A pipeline leak that spilled more than 5,000 gallons of crude onto public land near Riverton has been contained, but how it happened and how long the oil flowed remain unanswered.
Aaron Hencke, vice president and chief operating officer of pipeline operator Silver Creek Midstream, told Cowboy State Daily on Monday morning that the company's leak detection software flagged the spill at 3:59 p.m. Friday. Cleanup started that night, he said.
“They worked over the weekend,” Hencke said. “They’re back on location this morning, just hauling out the soil to an offsite location. My understanding as of Saturday is that they were about 80% cleaned up.”
Multi-agency response
In the next few weeks, Hencke said, a portion of the pipeline will be cut and sent for investigation into the cause. For now, a repair sleeve was placed over the damaged section, and the line returned to service at 10 a.m. Saturday.
Jillian Scott, public information officer for the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, told Cowboy State Daily that cleanup and mitigation have been a multi-agency effort. Fremont County Emergency Services and the Wyoming Department of Homeland Security's regional emergency response team assisted Silver Creek Midstream.
WDEQ spill coordinator Kate Miller remains on site to oversee mitigation efforts, Scott said.
“They’re all assisting in containing the oil,” Scott said.
On Monday afternoon, Scott told Cowboy State Daily that the spill originated from private property owned by Jones Land and Livestock. It caused no impact to any waterways or watersheds, she said.
“Everybody was working hard over the weekend to make sure that was not going to impact Ocean Lake or any of the streams or creeks near there,” Scott said.
‘Future Generations’
Bobbi Shongutsie was on her way to Fort Washakie when she saw emergency vehicles lining the road shortly after the spill Friday evening.
“From the road, you could see the oil spraying up out of the ground,” Shongutsie said. “It was about eight feet high spraying out and then the wind was catching it.”
While Scott told Cowboy State Daily that most of the spill happened on private property, some of the oil ran downhill onto tribal land, where cleanup was still underway.
For Shongutsie, an Eastern Shoshone tribal citizen, contamination of the land surrounding the Wind River Reservation is just as much a threat as contamination on tribal land itself.
“At one time it was tribal land within the 1863 Fort Bridger treaty borders,” Shongutsie said. “We can’t tell the future, but there might be a group of younger Native Americans that might be able to reclaim our lands one day.”
If that ever happens, she hopes that agricultural and industrial development won’t have left behind a permanent scar.
"We have to leave something for the future generations,” Shongutsie said. “They can’t just be born into contaminated water, born where they can’t grow good crops. We won’t live forever, but the land will.”
After initial reports of the spill, Shongutsie was dismayed to see online comments framing the leak as no big deal. She pushed back against the mindset that environmental contamination should simply be accepted.
“We’re all fighting for water right now,” Shongutsie said. “We have an oil spill and everyone’s just like ‘Oh, it happens all the time.’ But it has to stop.”
While acknowledging that the cleanup started quickly, Shongutsie remains doubtful that standard remediation tactics will fully restore the land.
“I guess that’s what you could call it,” Shongutsie said of the cleanup. “They scraped the land all the way through there. What are we going to do about it besides just scraping the land? Are they just going to just scrape it and call it good or are they going to plug in some plants over there?”
‘Under Control’
Ginger Bennett, executive director of the Wyoming GOP, was also driving past the site Friday evening, though her takeaway from the scene was different.
“It looked like a bunch of guys working really diligently to clean something up so it didn’t cause a problem for their community,” Bennett told Cowboy State Daily.
When they passed the site, Bennett and her husband were on their way to go hunting. They didn't stop, in part because her husband works in the industry and sized up the response at a glance.
“My husband does this for a living,” Bennett said. “He looked at it and he was like, ‘Dang they got that under control.’”
The other reason was timing. They had already left later than planned, so her immediate fear when seeing the flurry of emergency vehicles was that traffic would back up and delay their hunt even further.
“You don’t stop and take pictures of that,” Bennett said. “Especially when you’re going hunting.”
Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
