Font ResizeBP's Prudhoe Bay oil facilities have seen its second leak in the past month, resulting in oil, natural gas and produced water sprayed over 12,000 square feet.
BP and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation are working to clean up a wide-spread oil spray incident at Site 6 - located 5 miles away from the Lisburne facility where 46,000 gallons of oil, water and natural gas spilled on November 29th. This recent incident was discovered Monday around 10:30am in a routine site inspection. Most affectecd
Tom DeRuyter of the DEC says that 12,000 square feet surrounding the well were sprayed with continuous oil, with a more discontinuous spread of 5,000 square feet due to wind patterns at the time. He also stops short of drawing any parallels between the two events.
"We're going to work each one of these spills individually; we're going to get them cleaned up," he said. "This spill also will have an investigation done as to what the cause of the line situation was. And once you have the investigation done, then you can start looking for any commonality in the causes."
Consistent with its protocol, BP declined the opportunity for an on-camera or recorded phone interview. But in a phone conversation, Steve Rinehart of Alaska BP said" We think a weld failed... It trigged a shutdown, and the operator reported it." He said that site officials were looking into it, adding "The amount of volume involved is not large, the leak stopped when the well shut
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