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Six US States Declare Emergency after Major Gasoline Pipeline Spill; Media Almost Silent

posted by martyb on Monday September 19 2016, @09:12AM   Printer-friendly

Whoever writes:

The Colonial Pipeline spill has caused 6 states (Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and North Carolina) to declare a state of emergency. Gasoline (petrol) prices on the east coast are likely to spike. Yet, most puzzling is how this vast emergency and its likely effect on cost of living has gone unnoticed by mainstream media outlets. The pipeline is owned by Koch Industries: is this why the media is silent?

[Are there any Soylentils in the affected area who can corroborate this story? Have you heard of the spill, seen long gas lines, or any price gouging? -Ed.]

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VanessaE on Monday September 19 2016, @05:52PM

    by VanessaE (3396) <vanessa.e.dannenberg@gmail.com> on Monday September 19 2016, @05:52PM (#403869) Journal

    The pipeline break/leak caused a minor gas shortage in Western NC, Asheville area. Not 1970's-level, but enough to force people off of the road and gas stations to close-off their pumps for a while. Meanwhile, prices have risen by about 15 percent in the past 24 hours.

    Frankly, I think the "crisis" is manufactured. The leak dumped 250'000 gallons of fuel into a small body of water before it was shut off, and when I last read, 230'000 gallons of fuel and water have since been recovered. How much of that is actually fuel, I don't know, but even if none was recovered, it shouldn't matter in the slightest, as far as fuel availability and price are concerned, because the US uses over 380 million gallons [eia.gov] of gas every day.

    That spill represented 0.065 percent of the total daily usage. Greed, thy name is big oil.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19 2016, @11:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19 2016, @11:41PM (#404041)

    > The leak dumped 250'000 gallons of fuel

    Now its 335,000 gallons. The way these things go it will probably turn out to be significantly more. These numbers never go down.

    But the bigger problem is that the pipeline is turned off. So even though its not spilling, its not operating.

    • (Score: 2) by VanessaE on Tuesday September 20 2016, @12:41PM

      by VanessaE (3396) <vanessa.e.dannenberg@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 20 2016, @12:41PM (#404204) Journal

      I might tend to agree, but according to Colonial, they switched the load over to "Line 2" (which runs more or less parallel to the broken pipe) before the weekend was up; "Line 1" may take some time to repair, but I doubt it'll be very long. Meanwhile, as I understand it, that pipe carried about 37 million gallons of gasoline a day, so not even 10 percent of the total country's usage.

      I dunno, I still say the whole thing was overblown massively, all as a money grab.

      I'll be glad when solar and other renewables, and cars powered by them, take over. Fuck petroleum.