A cleanup is still underway nearly a week after authorities learned that an oil well was spewing contaminated water near the Green River. Over the weekend, the petroleum reached the river, and now some observers want to focus on preventing future accidents.
Beth Ransel, who oversees the Moab office of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, points out that emergency crews plugged the high-powered leak from an old oil well Thursday. But she explains they were only partly successful in containing the damage.
“There was heavy rains on Friday night,” Ransel says, “and on Saturday it was discovered that they had overtaken those preventative measures and that some of those residues of oil that had been within the wash area had mobilized by that storm water and then carried to the Green River.”
She says the contaminated water traveled down the 3-mile Salt Wash and into the Green River, but no one knows how much. She’s pleased with the efforts of the state and federal agencies, the company that owns the well and its cleanup contractors.
But Steve Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance says this latest spill should be raising red flags.
“We think this should be a cautionary tale for the BLM and for other land management agencies like the School Trust Land Administration,” he says.
Bloch describes last week’s leak as the kind of accident that could have been predicted, since many of the wells in Utah are getting old.
“We need to be doing all that we can to prevent them from happening and a big way to do is going to be to not allow drilling in sensitive landscapes like this.”
Bloch would also like to see the land agencies check other wells that might be in danger of failing that are located in popular recreation areas or environmentally important places.
BLM officials say the agency was up-to-date on the inspections at the leaky well, which is south of Green River City and near the put in for rafters and canoe paddlers headed into Labyrinth Canyon.
