With the one-year anniversary of the oil spill into the North Saskatchewan River fast approaching, officials with Husky Energy were before city council Monday to provide a cleanup update.
The presentation by Chris Meloche, senior manager with Husky Energy out of Calgary, focused on the ongoing remediation efforts to clean up the river and the shoreline after the release of 225 cubic meters of oil from their pipeline near Maidstone.
He noted 60 per cent of the leak was contained on land, with 40 per cent of the volume entering the river. Cleanup activities commenced immediately and continued until October of last year when cold weather intervened. It resumed again in the spring.
On Sept. 16, the Water Security Agency allowed for the treating of water again from the North Saskatchewan River. Monitoring of conditions and sampling through the ice continued throughout the winter.
The main piece of news he had to share was about the ongoing testing done on the North Saskatchewan River.
Over 5,200 water samples and over 1,300 sediment samples were collected in 2016, with Husky working with third-party experts as well as the Water Security Agency and Ministry of the Environment. Husky was looking for oil not only in the river system but also at the bottom of the river in the sediment samples, Meloche said.
According to figures Meloche provided, there have been “no exceedences” of Canadian drinking water guidelines since Oct. 5, 2016, based on the water samples.
The other activity going on is shoreline cleanup assessment. Among the innovating things used last year was the use of oil-sniffing canines.
“They’re amazing to watch, they have an amazing detection ability,” Meloche said. Even with a small drop of oil buried under the sediment, the dogs can pick up on it, he said.
A total of 134 km of shoreline has been cleaned up, mostly using manual labour.
There was also a focus on the ecosystem and the fish populations as well, and over 8,000 fish were collected and tested.
For 2017, water testing is continuing and samples are collected every two weeks all the way along the river up to Prince Albert. There continues to be “no exceedences” in water quality, he said. As well, sediment samples continue to be collected and there continues to be no exceedences from those, either. The samples from North Battleford were non-detectable for any petroleum or hydrocarbons, he said.
As for shoreline activity, cleanup work continues with the use of four teams of dogs. Those efforts turned up some small, isolated pieces of oil material on vegetation on Finlayson Island that would have been swept in during the high water in August; there were also pieces of wood found with sporadic staining of oil.
Those were all picked up by the oil-sniffing dogs, and removed. More cleanup work will continue to go on in July and August, and additional assessment will go on as well.
Husky has also been utilizing submerged oil detection devices called SODS, which look like pom-poms but are submerged in the river and are designed to stick to any submerged oil.
Those had been used last year and had detected oil, but oil is not being detected this year.
“We are not seeing oil suspended or moving through the water column,” Meloche said.
He indicated Husky continues to be in close contact with officials with the City of North Battleford including City Manager Jim Puffalt and Director of Utility Services Stewart Schafer.
“We appreciate the collaborative working relationship we’ve had with the City of North Battleford,” said Meloche.
Husky has based its cleanup operations this summer out of the Don Ross Centre in North Battleford, and they have used the airport as well as the boat launch location as well. Meloche expressed appreciation for the availability of those facilities to Husky, saying it’s “really turned out well.”
