A crew cleaning 30,000 gallons of tar sands spilled in MN

by Carter / Earth First! Newswire

If you missed the first edition it’s here

The embarrassing industrial gaffs just keep coming! Earlier this week TransCanda had to wipe the toxic egg of their face when a tailing pond from the tar sands spilled into the Athabasca River. As if that wasn’t enough to make you chuckle at the sheer negligence and/or stupidity of these blundering billionaires, the two additional tar sands spills that happened this week should have you laughing until you cry… and then weeping for hours.

First off, on March 27 a massive train pulling tankers full of tar sands derailed and spilled in western Minnesota, This wacky “uh-oh” was reported to have “spilled 30,000 gallons of crude oil” when “14 cars on a 94-car train derailed, near the town of Parkers Prairie, MN, 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis, spilling their contents.” The mainstream media picked up the “crude oil” line quickly, but Tar Sands Blockaders knew a black, sticky, poisonous lie when they smelled it. Upon further questioning Dan Olson, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, confirmed to Tar Sands Blockade that the substance spilled was, indeed, tar sands from Alberta, Canada. Woops! Up to this point only 1,000 gallons of the 30,000 has been cleaned, the cold weather making the tar sands difficult to remove.

But wait, the industrial blunders don’t stop there! On Friday March 29, Exxon’s tar sands pipe line “Pegasus” ruptured under a housing subdivision in Mayflower, Arkansas. According to local KATV “Chief of Police Bob Satkowsk confirmed that the Northwoods subdivision on Highway 89 was evacuated because of health risks from the crude oil fumes and possible fires should any sparks reach the oil” and that “the oil flowed into the storm drain system, a drainage ditch, under Highway 365 and under Interstate 40.” They are now working to strengthen the earthen dams they have set up to ensure the oil does not begin moving again. Once that is done, they will create an underflow culvert that will allow water to drain through without releasing the oil into Lake Conway and then they will begin the cleanup process.” The antics just never stop with these guys!

The leek in the pipeline which carries tar sands from Illinois to Texas came not long after Exxon modified the capacity of the Pegasus pipeline, increasing the capacity to transport Canadian tar sands oil by 50 percent. Exxon now assures us that newly installed, fancy pants leek detectors will keep this from happening in the future.

Well that’s it for this week’s edition of Tar Sands Bloopers (at least a hope so, for fucks sake). Were not sure when the next episode will come out, but one thing is for certain: there will be a continuous stream of disastrous events as long as people attempt to extract, transport and refine toxic tar sands. If you are really iching for more tar sand transportation gone wrong stories, take the time to remind yourself of the most dastardly of the deadly, dark, accidental drainages in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where over a million gallons of tar sands spilled in July 2010. God help us all.