Nearly a week after a massive oil spill from the Keystone pipeline in rural Washington County, officials still don’t know what caused the failure, resulting in over 14,000 barrels of crude oil to flow into Mill Creek, near the Kansas-Nebraska border.
Clean up activities continue, with the Environmental Protection Agency saying it had recovered nearly 2,600 barrels of liquid from the scene, most of it an oil-water mixture. Just 435 barrels of oil have been recovered directly from the ruptured pipeline.
A Reuters report Tuesday said Washington County officials have been told it will likely take weeks for the cleanup effort to be completed. U.S. Crude futures jumped to 3.5 percent to $75.73 a barrel Tuesday, partly on concerns linked to the Keystone shutdown, it reported.
Gov. Laura Kelly, who was in Westmoreland Tuesday for an announcement on a state program to fund several bridge projects, told reporters afterward she has not been directly in conversation with TC Energy, which operates the pipeline that runs from Alberta, Canada to Oklahoma, but is confident in the ongoing cleanup effort.
“We’ve got folks from KDHE who are all over it and working closely with the companies and with the feds to ensure that the cleanup is done and done well, and that they’re mitigating any further damage, including to our drinking water system,” she said.
Kelly says she’s looking forward to results of the investigation to see what prevention efforts can be made to avoid any future spills, though stopped short of saying whether last week’s spill has tainted her view of the pipeline crossing through Kansas.
“We know that there’s always a risk of those kinds of things happening. I’m looking forward to the results of the investigation to see what, if anything we can do to ensure something like this never happens again,” she said.
Following the spill last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation ordered TC Energy to take the segment offline until action to address public health and environmental concerns are completed. That includes a submitted analysis detailing what went wrong, as well as testing and a plan for how to restart operations.
More than 300 officials remain on scene assisting with the cleanup effort.
