Enbridge Inc. is cleaning up after oil leaked from a storage tank at its facility near Edmonton.
At about 3:45 p.m. Monday, the National Energy Board was called to the refinery row industrial area, east of the city. It says the oil flowed into a storm pond on an adjacent site and to a creek.
“There is a boom in the creek that’s just on the other side of this industrial site, that’s capturing the oil,” said NEB spokesperson Tom Neufeld. “There’s also some vacuum trucks on site that’s cleaning up the oil and right now the focus is on cleaning up and remediating the site.”
NEB inspectors are monitoring the clean up and investigators won’t have an estimate of how much oil spilled until it’s done. They’re also trying to find out how long it went undetected.
“That’s going to be the subject of the investigation, if the leak began on Monday or if it had been leaking for days or longer prior to that,” said Neufeld.
He added, just like pipelines, storage tanks are tightly regulated and they would have detection systems and berms to stop a spill. The Transportation Safety Board is also involved in the investigation.
The spill is the second for Enbridge that the NEB and the TSB responded to this year. The first was a leak of about 200,000 litres of oil condensate from a pipeline on Feb. 17 in the same area.
