Heating oil spill hits residential Yellowknife street

The spill wasn’t great. The timing was worse.

An estimated 120 litres of heating oil leaked from a Midnight Petroleum truck on Yellowknife’s Rycon Drive on Monday evening, just as spring run-off stepped up a gear in warmer weather.

As the company began figuring out how to contain the spill, it mixed with meltwater and may have reached the nearby Rat Lake, environmental authorities said.

While the NWT’s Department of Environment and Climate Change says environmental services firm KBL was “promptly contacted and arrived at the scene the same evening,” two residents of the street told Cabin Radio they found the response inadequate.

One, watching the cleanup from the sidewalk the following day, described the situation as a “hot mess.” At the time, the smell of fuel hung in the air along at least half of the street.

Another resident, asking to be identified only by their first name, Kate, said the fuel truck appeared ill-equipped to handle a spill of “anything more than a really small amount.”

“Their initial spill response was a few small spill pads, the size of a puppy training pad, stuck in the middle of this stream of contaminated water running down the side of the street. That was all that was there for hours,” she said.

Kate said a full response didn’t seem to begin until two or three hours after the initial spill. Twenty-four hours afterward, she said nobody from the company had been in touch with her about a remediation plan or to provide information.

“It’s really hard to evaluate our own personal risk level and know that we, our kids and our pets are going to be safe, let alone what’s going to happen to the beautiful Rat Lake that’s right behind our house,” she said.

“The tendency is to be really worried about stuff if you don’t have any information about it. That’s my concern.”

‘Following all the guidelines’

Midnight Petroleum manager Jeremy Richard said his company, cleanup contractor KBL and other firms had done a “tremendous amount of work” to address the spill.

Even so, Richard said he understood why residents might have questions.

“I would completely understand someone looking out and seeing me standing there on my phone, wondering why someone’s not doing something. I can completely understand someone feeling that way,” he said.

“But we did go well into the night. I think it was 1:30am when we left the site that first night. While I can understand their concerns, there was a lot of tracking the right people down with the right tools that had to happen.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Environment and Climate Change said a faulty gasket on the fuel truck had been to blame for the spill, which took place while the truck was filling a home heating oil tank.

“KBL has been diligently managing the cleanup operation, which has extended from April 9 through April 10. A significant amount of snow and approximately several thousand litres of runoff water have been collected by KBL as part of the cleanup efforts,” the department stated.

“The impacted area, estimated to cover approximately 200 metres, may extend into Rat Lake due to suspected product entrainment by spring runoff,” the statement continued. Entrainment is when something – like the heating oil – is picked up and carried away by a fluid, like water.

“Confirmation of this will be obtained through sampling and laboratory analysis,” said ECC.

ECC, which provided the 120-litre estimate for the amount of fuel leaked, said Midnight Petroleum must produce a remedial action plan for the department to review and approve.

“Homeowners in the neighbourhood have expressed their concerns and ECC is overseeing the situation,” the department stated. “ECC has informed Midnight Petroleum and their consultant that post-cleanup inspections will be conducted after the spring thaw to ensure satisfactory remediation.”

The department said the spring run-off had made the situation more complex than it otherwise would be, and said it acknowledged “Midnight Petroleum’s proactive steps towards resolution.”

“We’ve jumped all over it,” said Richard, reached by phone on Wednesday, describing the short-term focus as excavating all the snow that could have been contaminated.

“We’ve got people from the south that have come up to help with the environmental aspect,” he said, “someone with a lot of experience in this field to make sure we’re making all the right decisions and following all the guidelines that ECC has put into place.”