Oct. 10, 2006 was ‘black Tuesday’ in Slave Lake – at least it was for the animal residents of a few beaver ponds east of town. That was the day that an oil pipeline sprung a leak, spewing about 1,200 cubic metres of black crude into a series of ponds.
Most of the oil was cleaned up within a few days of the incident. The clean-up continued until frost and snow shut the project down for the winter.
In May, the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board announced that it was satisfied with the remediation efforts of Rainbow Pipeline, Ltd. and also satisfied that the leak did not happen due to any notable lack of diligence on the part of the company.
What caused the pipe to spring a leak, said the EUB in its May 9 release, was “stress cracking, fatigue cracking and external coating failure.”
The EUB did not lay any charges against Rainbow or its owners (Imperial Oil, Exxon Mobil and Shell Canada), but it did recommend some steps to reduce the likelihood of a repeat incident on the big line from Zama Lake to Edmonton.
Imperial spokesperson Pius Rolheiser told The Leader last week that the company has acted on those matters.
One was to lower the pressure in the line by 20 per cent, which Rolheiser says translates to about a 10 per cent reduction in volume.
“That’s where we still are,” he says, adding that the company’s intention is to get back up to normal operating pressure eventually.
Another action was to dig up and repair “over 30 sites that have similar data characteristics to the failed section.” That project has been completed, Rolheiser said.
Additionally, the company has doubled the frequency of aerial monitoring of the line and increased ground surveillance at water crossings.
Further, Rainbow has “decreased the magnitude of pressure fluctuations,” Rolheiser said.
Finally, the company is working with an international pipeline research body, “to further our understanding of conditions that might have led to stress corrosion conditions.”
Rolheiser said remediation work continues at the spill site, although, “if you went there now you wouldn’t see any trace of oil.
“From our perspective, the detection and response went as it should.”
The seven-page EUB report on the spill and clean-up can be viewed at http://www.eub.ca/docs/documents/reports/IR_20070509_RainbowPipeline-SlaveLake-Mitsue.pdf. If that’s too much typing, a Google search for ‘Rainbow Pipeline’ delivers a link to the report as the third item from the top of the search results.

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