Everyone agrees that the two disasters — the flooding of the Yellowstone River and the oil spill in the riverbed — are connected. According to Exxon officials, the high and fast-moving river has four times its usual flow this year, which has hampered cleanup and prevented their workers from reaching the exact source of the spill. Also thanks to the flooding, the oiled water has breached the riverbanks, inundating farmland, endangering animals, killing crops and contaminating surface water. And the rush of water appears to be carrying the oil toward North Dakota.

Government and company officials have also speculated that the flooding may even have caused the spill in the first place. Recent testing showed the pipeline was buried five to eight feet under the riverbed, but officials suspect that raging water may have exposed the pipe, leaving it vulnerable to fast-moving debris.

(Billings, Mont —, July 9, 2011) On July 6^th EPA issued ExxonMobil an administrative order instructing them to provide information on the circumstances of the spill, conduct appropriate recovery and remediation actions, and perform ongoing environmental sampling. The order also requires ExxonMobil to provide a work plan which is currently being reviewed by the state of Montana, EPA, and other agency partners. Once approved, the work plan will be publicly available.

Preliminary testing results of water samples indicate there are no detections above drinking water standards; we will be providing data over the weekend. There are 3 water systems in the affected area: Billings, Lakewood, and Laurel. Additionally, EPA will be conducting indoor air sampling at residences impacted by the spill and will continue to coordinate domestic well water testing.

(Source: epa.gov)

From the Guardian:

Clean-up crews have yet to reach the site of the pipeline break nearly a week after the rupture, which leaked 42,000 US gallons (159,000 litres) of oil into the Yellowstone, one of the last undammed rivers left in America.

State officials in Montana criticised oil company executives for offering conflicting accounts of the pipeline breach and its safety record.

There is also evidence that ExxonMobil was aware the pipeline was in a geologically vulnerable location and that the company was aware of potential serious vulnerabilities to rupture and to a serious spill into the Yellowstone River. There are now questions about whether any pipeline should be buried at such shallow depth below a shifting riverbed vulnerable to erosion. 

The rupture of a pipeline in Montana has caused at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil to spill into the pristine Yellowstone River, raising concerns about the tar sands pipeline planned to pass through the most important fossil aquifer in North America. The spill is precisely the kind of irreversible and unnecessary environmental disaster conservationists, farmers, energy reformers and local activists across the Great Plains seek to prevent.

The initial reports cited Exxon-Mobil spokespeople explaining that only a few hundred barrels of oil had been released into the river, and that the multinational was bringing in top cleanup experts from across the nation to do the most advanced cleanup work possible. But yesterday the news came that the spill had in fact released at least several tens of thousands of barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River, threatening pristine wilderness, delicate ecosystems, and human health, across several states.

 Exxon-Mobil now says its expert cleanup effort is being hampered by Mother Nature. The takeaway seems to be that, more than twenty years after the catastrophic Exxon-Valdez spill, the oil giant has used its routine megaprofits to produce no viable cleanup strategy. It also appears there was insufficient maintenance to an insufficiently constructed pipeline, and a near total disregard for the potential impact on the natural and human environment. [Keep reading…]

(Source: thehotspring.net)