This week’s catch on the Skagit delta: Tasty crabs, toxic soil

Tuesday was a busy day along Washington’s Skagit River delta.

Backhoes dug up about 23 dump-truck loads of gasoline-tainted soil near Bulson Creek and Hill Ditch — two waterways that carry salmon past farms and the town of Conway, Wash.

Trucks then carried the hazardous waste, created when 25,000 gallons of gasoline spilled from the Olympic Pipeline on Dec. 10, to a landfill in eastern Oregon. The heavy hauling was part of an emergency effort to minimize damage to one of the Puget Sound region’s most productive landscapes.

Offshore, dozens of commercial and tribal fishing boats maneuvered for the opening day of Dungeness crab season in the Whidbey Basin. Crews lowered steel-mesh pots to the muddy seafloor between Whidbey Island and the Skagit and Stillaguamish deltas and, in a single day, hauled up at least 250,000 of the coveted crustaceans.

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To date, cleanup workers have recovered about 7,400 gallons of gasoline from the Olympic Pipeline spill. It’s unclear how much of the spill remains in the ground or has evaporated.

Pockets of gasoline could still bubble up as waterways rise and fall with tides and the weather, according to the multiagency group responding to the spill. Survey teams have found “trace” gasoline damage along 1,800 feet of Hill Ditch and its tributary, Bulson Creek, and laid out 2,300 feet of absorbent boom to keep any gasoline from spreading to other shorelines.

Nine homeowners along Hill Ditch — part of a network of artificial waterways that helped turn most of the Skagit delta’s vast salt marshes into productive cropland a century ago — have asked to have their wells tested for contamination.

State officials said no pollution has reached the Skagit River, about a mile from the spill site, and said they have had no reports of damage to crabs or salmon. Still, three ducks, a pine siskin, and a beaver have been killed by the gasoline. The beaver likely died from inhaling gasoline fumes, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Any dead salmon would probably sink and go unnoticed, according to fisheries biologist Mike LeMoine with the Skagit River System Cooperative, a project of the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle Tribes.

Tiny pipe, big spill

The Olympic Pipeline is owned by BP. The 400-mile system carries gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from four refineries on the shores of Puget Sound to Seattle, Sea-Tac, Renton, Tacoma, Vancouver, and Portland.

Where the gasoline spilled, the Olympic Pipeline is actually two parallel pipes, one 16 inches wide and the other 20 inches wide. BP and state regulators say part of the larger pipe’s leak-detection system itself sprang a leak.

A stainless-steel pipe-fitting, just 3/8” in diameter, came loose inside a room-sized, underground vault that houses valves and pressure-detecting equipment for the two pipelines.

“It’s used all the time in the plumbing world as well as industrial applications like this one,” Dennis Ritter, chief pipeline-safety engineer at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, said of the 3/8” fitting. “It’s a very reliable system. That’s why we were very surprised it somehow came loose.”

“What we’re trying to figure out is why,” Ritter said.

“The failed component has been sent to an approved independent lab for a full analytic review,” BP spokesperson Pam Brady said in an email.

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Brady said equipment failures had caused two fuel spills from the pipeline in 2022: a 440-gallon spill in Mount Vernon and an 8-gallon spill in Renton, both of which were contained without contacting soil or water.

Ritter said the vault in Conway was filled with water at the time of the leak, as many underground vaults do each winter.

“The leak occurred underwater,” Ritter said. “Instead of aerosolizing the gasoline, making it into a vapor, it released underwater and bubbled its way to the top.”

About 5,000 gallons of gasoline remained in the concrete vault, with another 20,000 gallons escaping.

“We keep hearing that this was a small tube failure, which begs the question: Just how long was it leaking for?” Kenneth Clarkson with the Pipeline Safety Trust, a Bellingham-based nonprofit, said in a press release. “Over 25,000 gallons of gasoline is a lot of gasoline to leak through a small tube.”

According to a press release from the unified command, operators at Olympic Pipeline headquarters in Renton began “a series of steps to shut down the main pipeline” after learning it had lost pressure.

“Residual pressure caused the release of gasoline to continue for several hours,” the release states.

The Olympic Pipeline spill is the second-largest spill of a hazardous liquid in Washington state in the 21st century, after the fiery crash of a mile-long oil train in the town of Custer in 2020.

After the Olympic Pipeline exploded in Bellingham in 1999, killing three people, $4 million of the criminal fines imposed was used to create the Pipeline Safety Trust.

Though gasoline and its vapors are toxic, its spills are generally considered less disastrous than spills of crude oil or heavier petroleum products.

The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration requires pipeline valves to be inspected twice a year. Brady said results are pending for the latest federal inspections: a field inspection in May and a records inspection in October.

Brady said Olympic Pipeline officials also conduct monthly inspections, with the latest inspection on Dec. 7 showing “satisfactory” results.

BP faces as much as $10 million in state and federal fines and is on the hook for cleanup and investigation costs.

Washington State Department of Ecology spokesperson Ty Keltner said Tuesday he could not yet provide an estimate of what the state has spent to date to clean up this spill.