ExxonMobil served deadline to clean Yellowstone River oil spill
09 Jul 2011
ExxonMobil says that it had stepped up efforts to absorb the oil spilled from the ruptured pipeline in Montana and was putting more people at work to clean up the Yellowstone River.
According to the company, it had placed more than 9,000 feet of boom and almost 160,000 absorbent pads to clean up oil adjacent to the river.
On 3 July Exxon said it had shut down a crude oil pipeline following the leakage of as much as 1,000 barrels of crude oil into the Yellowstone River in Montana.
According to the company it estimated that more than 750 to 1,000 barrels of oil were released before the leak was detected.
The spill came just weeks following the company shutting down the pipeline in May after the city of Laurel voiced safety concerns over the rising levels of the river from rain and runoff.
Though the Montana oil spill is much smaller than last year's BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, it spewed 168 million gallons of oil and the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil.
On Friday Exxon was ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency to complete the cleanup of the estimated 1,000-barrel spill by 9 September.