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About 350 people are now involved in the effort to clean up the Yellowstone River oil spill. Gary Pruessing, president of ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, described the cleanup effort in a conference call.
“Most of our activity right now is trying to get absorbent boom and absorbent pads out into places where we can collect oil. We now have over 45,000 feet of absorbent boom — that’s about eight miles of boom that’s available to actually apply. We have over 2000 absorbent pads, and the pads are being applied all the places where we have oil that we can still recover.”
Roughly 1000 barrels of crude oil spilled into the Yellowstone on Friday, following a pipeline break under the river near Laurel, Montana. The Yellowstone rose above flood stage on Tuesday, increasing the dangers that crude will flow into backchannels vital to the river’s fishery.
