Yellowstone River Oil Spill Pollutes Montana Town’s Water With Benzene

Essential to Life

Days after up to 40,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a broken pipeline, an unknown amount of which ended up in the Yellowstone River, one Montana town downstream from the spill is now under a drinking warning after elevated levels of a cancer-causing chemical were found in the town’s drinking supply.

The warning was issued Monday for Glendive, Montana, a town of around 6,000 people on the North Dakota border, more than two days after the spill occurred, after tests on a water treatment plant revealed concentrations of Benzene above limits safe for consumption, the Billings Gazette reports.

Residents of the town were told not to cook or drink using water from their taps while water at the intake plant was being treated. As the Guardian reports, truckloads of bottled water were shipped into the town to help provide potable water to residents. It’s not yet known when the water system will be back in operation, government officials said.

Failure of Safety

As the Centers for Disease Control notes, Benzene is a “natural part of crude oil,” and ingesting high concentrations of the chemical can cause digestion issues, like vomiting, in the short term, and anemia, leukemia and other cancers in the long term.

Just after the spill, after initial tests conducted on the water by the EPA, a city press release said that it was “unlikely the crude oil would impact Glendive’s water intake” and that despite complaints of “odor” emanating from the tap, “incident command has no reason to think there has been an adverse impact to the Glendive water system,” according to a part of the press release posted on the Billings-Gazette website.

However, as the paper notes, an inspection on the broken pipeline revealed that the break took place just 50 feet from the shore of the river, suggesting that much more oil might have spilled into the river than initially thought.

Now, oil has been spotted as far as 25 miles away from the site of the broken pipeline. As the Los Angeles times reports, the spread of the crude oil prompted Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to declare a state of emergency for two counties along the Yellowstone River.

While an investigation continues into what caused the pipeline to break, workers are trying to recover oil from the river, and residents of Glendive continue to drink bottled water.

This isn’t the first time crude oil has been spilled into the Yellowstone River. In July 2011, a pipeline controlled by Exxon-Mobil broke, spilling 63,000 gallons of oil into the river.