Keystone tells the federal government that, in its plan to construct a pipeline to carry crude oil from the Alberta tar sands all the way down to Texas, across the Midwest’s Ogllala Aquifer, there’s no need to worry about an oil spill. Keystone says that it has remote sensing technology that will trigger an alert whenever an oil spill takes place, so that it can be stopped and cleaned up before major harm is done.
The unfortunate truth is that this technology almost never works. A review of data byInside Climate News finds that over the last ten years, only one in twenty pipeline oil spills were successfully identified by remote sensing technology. Over one in five of these spills were found by people who happened to be passing by the pipelines at the time of the spills. The rest were found by happenstance by pipeline company workers – meaning that many oil spills on pipelines weren’t found for quite a long time.
Consider that Keystone plans to construct a pipeline across a thousand miles of the Great Plains. There’s no way that Keystone can have employees scanning the entire pipeline. Given the frequent failure of its remote sensing technology, that means that any oil spills from the proposed XL pipeline will likely be left to pollute the American midwest for quite some time before crews can be dispatched to try to stop them and begin a cleanup.
Hey Green Man, i just got back from an afternoon Shale Gas Outrage rally in Philly. Great turn-out with speakers including Bill McKibbon and Josh Fox (as well as many others), it was held right out front of the Convention Center where the governor, industry lobbyists and fat cat owners were meeting (some of whom stood at the windows and smiled and sneered at us). Just like with nuclear energy, these polluters have no place safe to dump their waste products (but these people do it anyway) while gobbling up millions of gallons of fresh water for each well, which can never be processed back to potable again, pollute the air with too many waste gases to name and make anyone in proximity to their sites sick (including workers – that’s the kind of “jobs” they’re creating). They’ve even written into law a provision that doctors cannot tell a sick person if their contamination is what’s making them ill!
Hopefully it will make the evening news anyway.
not that the LAST spill was ever “repaired” (or the previous ones either):
“Nearly a year and a half after BP proudly and loudly announced they would spend $1 billion to begin the process of restoring the Gulf in the wake of their disaster, do you want to guess how much they’ve committed to the projects needed to implement that ‘early restoration’?
Less than 10%.
That’s right in 15 months, and with billions in projects suggested to BP and Gulf and federal leaders, they’ve agreed to about $60 million in restoration efforts.
Meanwhile, the impacts to the Gulf due to BP’s deepwater drilling disaster are becoming more apparent. Corals have been smothered in BP’s oil, deepwater fish have lesions, likely from BP’s crude. In the wake of Hurricane Isaac, more of BP’s oil showed up in the marsh and on our barrier islands.”
(in an e-mail from healthygulf.org)