Oil Spill and Unified Command Final Report
The spill was first discovered at 5:45 AM, March 2, 2006 by a BP operator who was driving on a road along the pipeline and noticed the smell. It took three days for workers to discover the source of the oil. According to the Unified Command (consisting of several groups including BP, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) Final Report, "The source was a quarter inch hole at the 6 o'clock position in an above ground 34-inch diameter crude oil transit pipeline. The hole was discovered in the pipe within a buried culvert (caribou crossing)." The transit line ran between Gathering Center 2 and Gathering Center 1. The spill went undetected for as long as five days, according to a New York Times report of a BP press conference on the spill in mid-March 2006.
Subsequent investigation found a six inch layer of sediment in the bottom of the pipe section. Investigators said that the sludge helped breed acidic bacteria and corrosion that ultimately ate though the pipe. BP executives said they were surprised that corrosion developed in the large trunk lines because they didn't carry much water mixed with the oil. But they were aware that sediment was collecting and that leak technology wouldn't work if the lines were not periodically cleaned. Federal and state authorities concluded that BP did not spend the money necessary to maintain the Prudhoe pipes. Reports of the spill's volume varied widely at the time of the spill. On March 25, 2008, the Unified Command for spill response announced that the volume of crude oil spilled was 212,252 US gallons (5,053.6 bbl), making it more than three times larger than any spill ever reported on the North Slope.
Clean-up work was completed on May 2, 2006 and the site was backfilled and covered with a 4 to 6 inch layer of chunks of live, frozen tundra that were taken from a donor site and transplanted to the spill site Government environmental officials said it could take up to a decade for the tundra vegetation to return to normal.
BP decommissioned the entire 34-inch transit line and replaced it with a 20-inch line, containing pig launch and recovery sites.
Read more about this topic: Prudhoe Bay Oil Spill
Famous quotes containing the words oil, spill, unified, command, final and/or report:
“No skilled hands
caress a stranger’s flesh with lucid oil before
a word is spoken
no feasting
before a tale is told, before
the stranger tells his name.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“How did you get in the Navy? How did you get on our side? Ah, you ignorant, arrogant, ambitious—keeping sixty two men in prison cause you got a palm tree for the work they did. I don’t know which I hate worse, you or that malignant growth that stands outside your door. How did you ever get command of a ship? I realize in wartime they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel. But where’d they ever scrape you up?”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You’ve got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. “Be yourself” is the last motto.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Even the ones who report favorably don’t seem to have read the book.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)