Red Butte oil spill cleanup continues

SALT LAKE CITY — The skimming, pumping and recapture of thousands of gallons of sticky crude oil are set to continue Monday along a hard-hit stretch of Red Butte Creek and the petroleum-polluted waters of the pond at Liberty Park.

While Saturday's leak from the Chevron pipeline in Emigration Canyon has been capped, the hard work left by the spilled oil will continue on Day 3 of the cleanup and beyond — a process that will likely take weeks.

It will be longer than that before the oil's effects are wiped from the riparian corridor, which before the spill had been the focus of an intensive public outreach for rehabilitation, coordinated through Salt Lake City and the county.

Those grand plans are now on hold even before work begins, as the proposed two-year corridor study of the once pristine waterway gives way to repairing the damage from Saturday's oil leak.

"The hardest hit area of the creek was from Red Butte Garden down to Liberty Park," said state wildlife conservation officer Mike Roach. Both Red Butte and Emigration creeks flow out of the mountains into the Liberty Park pond and then continue out to the Jordan River.

"We have looked downstream below Liberty Park and the impact has been minimal and very manageable," Roach said.

Chevron workers, Salt Lake City firefighters and pipeline inspectors from the U.S. Department of Transportation continue to combat the mess, and a more thorough emergency response plan was due to be put into action Sunday night.

"We have about 60 to 70 people working in various stages to try to capture the oil," said Chevron spokesman Dan Johnson.

Chevron said it is sending the damaged pipe to engineers to determine what went wrong.

A public meeting is set for 7 p.m. today at Clayton Middle School, 1470 S. 1900 East. City and Chevron representatives will address questions and concerns, and share the most recent update.

A weekend interrupted

The fracture of the company's 10-inch diameter pipeline was noticed early Saturday after employees at the George E. Wahlen Veterans Administration Hospital reported smelling petroleum fumes. Johnson refuted information distributed by city officials that sensors first detected a problem on Friday night.

"We found out about the release of oil when the fire department notified us Saturday morning," Johnson said.