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You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Energy Policy / Speaking of Keystone

Speaking of Keystone

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The second oil spill on the Yellowstone River in four years has poisoned the Glendive, Montana water supply:

The 12-inch-diameter Poplar Pipeline spilled on Saturday morning. By Monday night, Glendive residents cleaned local grocery store shelves of bottled water as news spread that health officials had found benzene levels in the municipal water treatment plant at two to three times what the Center for Disease Control says is safe for long-term exposure.

Some elderly residents reported not having anything to drink to take medication. People who had drunk from their taps complained of stomachaches. Hospital and schools struggled to keep their charges hydrated and safe. Some businesses were forced to cut back services or close. People fled town to do laundry or take showers.

Not until Tuesday morning did the first pallets of clean, bottled water from Bridger Pipeline, owner of the Poplar Pipeline, arrive in Glendive. They were dispensed first to hospital, schools, nursing homes and the prison. Then they to went to other residents.

Bill Salvin, a spokesman hired by Bridger Pipeline who also fielded calls on Tuesday for the county government’s emergency services command center, said the delay was due to “a matter of logistics.”

I have family in Glendive, so I’ve visited there many times. The Yellowstone is the centerpiece of that town. It has no dams and is (was?) considered a “blue ribbon” trout stream.  I wonder how many jobs will be lost when fisherman don’t come back this year.

Reader Interactions

50Comments

  2. 2.

    chopper

    it almost seems like our tendency to shit all over a place is directly proportional to its beauty.

  6. 6.

    Mike in NC

    Some elderly residents reported not having anything to drink to take medication.

    FOX News watchers off their meds? Didn’t we already suspect that was the case?

  7. 7.

    ruemara

    How red is the area? Do they now get that there’s a benefit to keeping your water supply clean? Sorry, I have no more sympathy for the common clay of America.

  8. 8.

    Roger Moore

    You can’t make an omelet run a petroleum based economy without breaking a few eggs having the occasional pipeline leak. The best you can do is to make sure somebody else gets poisoned when it happens. Why else do you think the Canadians want to run their pipeline through the US instead of Canada?

  14. 14.

    Mike E

    @Roger Moore:

    Why else do you think the Canadians want to run their pipeline through the US instead of Canada?

    Because that’s where the ports are…north o’ th’ border folks aren’t so adverse to poison since getting that tar sand oil isn’t exactly a clean enterprise, yes?
    @chopper: Watching Ken Burns’ Nat’l Parks, you get the feeling beauty is an affront to capitalists everywhere.

  19. 19.

    Turner Hedenkoff

    This is why they’ve started calling Keystone a “jobs bill.” They’ll need folks to clean up after the spills.

  20. 20.

    feebog

    Rachel featured this story last night and interviewed the Mayor. The big problem is that the river is solidly frozen over, so no one has any idea how far down the river the oil has drifted. And they won’t know for several months until the river thaws.

  22. 22.

    Waldo

    The byproduct of unregulated capitalism is finally trickling down and all you guys do is complain. Ingrates!

  23. 23.

    Diana

    @ruemara: I agree. You think guvmint regulation restricts your freedom? Well, now you know what it does! And, wonder of wonders, maybe you could have found this out earlier, say, anytime over the past thirty years. sorry, no sympathy here.

  27. 27.

    Tommy

    The pipeline has or was built. Google it. Runs a few miles from my house in Woodriver, Illinois. It is an affront to all things human. I recall being a kid, Woodriver was in our conference, and we’d take a bus there. We could smell the place, the town, from miles away. Woodriver was not the right name for the town!

  29. 29.

    Tommy

    @mikefromArlington: Of course they should. I am an avid hiker/camper. Almost every year I reconnect with a college roommate from the 80s. We almost never talk during the year, but find a way to spend a week or so plus in a far off state/national park.

    Often times he brings somebody with him that has never camped before.The last few years a Republican. At the end of that experience they see the light. Two years ago we were in the Smoky Mountains. Said I needed to head out and pay for our camp site.

    The guy handed me a couple 20s. I was like dude it is only $11/night for our permit. Based pretty much on the honor system. He was confused. I took it upon myself to explain to him our government rocks.

  30. 30.

    muddy

    Benzene is nasty. When I was working as a (n oldstyle) draftsman, drawing with ink on mylar, I used it for cleanup. You could do all your set-up marks with a light blue pencil, which would not show up on blueprints. But the waxiness kept the ink from the mylar sometimes. Also fingerprints etc could interfere with the ink. So you’d take a little piece of tissue and wipe the mylar off with some benzene. Worked a treat.

    Then I found that the fingernail on the finger I used for the benzene tissue stopped growing. Mind you this is just putting a few drops on a tissue for a couple seconds, not like I was soaking in it. I decided to switch to tweezers to hold the benezene tissue, it was harder because I had to be careful not to scratch the mylar surface.

    It still took nearly a year for my fingernail to start growing again.

  31. 31.

    boatboy_srq

    I wonder how many jobs will be lost when fisherman don’t come back this year.

    There will be a spike in prices for fishing licenses and equipment in non-polluted areas, and a slightly lower spike for same in underpolluted areas, and discounts in Montana for the opportunity to reel in high-hydrocarbon catch. Free markets, baby!

    /snark

  32. 32.

    catclub

    Unfortunately, pipelines are the least safe way to transport oil, except for all the other ways.
    Ask the people in Lac Megantic Quebec about how safe oil trains are.

    Running pipelines and maintaining them may still be hard to do while extracting profits.

  33. 33.

    Tokyokie

    My only visit Yellowstone Park was around 1988, and on the way to the park, I stopped so I could get a sip of water from the clear-running stream near the road to the east entrance. (Checking a map, it must have been Blaine Creek.) Guess I can’t do that any longer because a pipeline company didn’t want to bury its pipeline deeply enough below a river. But I’m sure the Keystone Pipeline will be done environmentally correctly and will pose no danger to the Oglalla Acquifer.

  34. 34.

    Tommy

    @Tokyokie: Not sure I’d ever suggest you get some water that way, but I totally get your point. Thinking there is a creek you can drink out of isn’t a bad concept. It should be how we all view the world. Heaven forbid we have clean water.

  35. 35.

    The Ancient Randonneur

    … health officials had found benzene levels in the municipal water treatment plant at two to three times what the Center for Disease Control says is safe for long-term exposure.

    Keep the gubmint of of my … um, never mind.

  36. 36.

    Mart

    Do not forget about Enbridge. They are extending their tar sand pipeline network that currently supplies refineries near Chicago and St. Louis. They are connecting the Flanagan, IL terminal with the Cushing, OK terminal that KeystoneXL will (hopefully not) connect to. When I spoke to the project manager he said two-36 inch lines, but their internet says Flanagan South will have one 36 inch line. Following existing natural gas right of way so light permitting. Will cross the Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, and Arkansas Rivers to name a few.

  37. 37.

    Citizen Alan

    Has there ever been a dystopian fantasy so dark that it featured a mainstream and broadly popular political movement that supported the right of corporations to poison the entire nation’s drinking water if there was enough profit in doing so?

  42. 42.

    Roger Moore

    @muddy:

    Benzene is nasty.

    Yep. It’s one of the relatively rare substances that are proven to be carcinogens in humans. Most things that we believe are carcinogens are only suspect because they’ve been shown to produce cancer in lab animals at high doses*. Benzene is noxious enough- and used to be used by enough people without protective equipment, as you describe- that the epidemiological evidence that it’s a carcinogen is rock solid.

    *They have to use high doses to produce significant results in a reasonable number of lab animals, but this always makes the results questionable in humans because there may be a tolerable dose that our bodies can deal with effectively.

  43. 43.

    D58826

    And on a totally unrelated topic – Obama just flipped the bird at Bibi and Orangeman. He won’t meet with Bibi next month when he shows up in Washington to grandstand before Congress.

  44. 44.

    Bridgier

    Glendive is, in and of itself, a bit of a shithole, which has been content to drink the (treated) effluent of various up-river communities for the last several generations.

    Montana is pretty red, and getting redder all the time – Eastern Montana is currently ‘booming’ because it’s right next to the Bakken, and there’s a lot of oilfield jobs floating around the area, so there’s going to be a lot of sucking it up and taking it for the team, because, with the price of oil falling, the golden goose isn’t looking very healthy at the moment and people have mortgages and auto notes to pay.

  47. 47.

    Mike in NC

    @D58826: Bibi needs to be greeted warmly when he arrives to grovel to the GOP. Maybe start with a full body cavity search by some burly female TSA screeners.

  48. 48.

    brantl

    For fly fisherman (myself) included, this would be what pissing on a relic of the cross is, for Christians.

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