Alaska oil pipeline restarts after spill cleanup
May 29th, 2010 - 4:02 pm ICT by BNO NewsANCHORAGE, ALASKA (BNO NEWS) — A trans-Alaska oil pipeline was restarted on Friday afternoon after a shutdown which lasted more than three days, the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company said on Saturday.
Alyeska shut down the pipeline on Tuesday morning for a planned six-hour window to perform various maintenance work, which included the testing of Pump Station 9’s fire command system. A power failure at the station caused valves that are normally closed on the tank to open, as they are designed to do in power interruptions.
Tank 190 subsequently overflowed oil into a containment area surrounding the tank, causing no injuries and no impact to the environment.
The pipeline was restarted on Friday at 4.40 p.m. local time, after 79 hours and 40 minutes, and a crew will staff the pump station around the clock until normal operations have resumed. “About 200 people remain involved in managing the incident,” the company said. “That includes 125 people on site, and a team based in Fairbanks.”
The initial recovery effort was largely mechanical, with trucks suctioning crude oil into container trucks. The crude will be metered, filtered, and ultimately returned into the Trans Alaska Pipeline System. Soil and gravel on top of the liner will be cleaned up according to an approved process for handling contaminated material. Alyeska estimates approximately 5,000 barrels were released to containment.
A comprehensive tank safety analysis and remediation will be performed before the tank is returned to normal service.
The pipeline normally delivers about 650,000 barrels of oil daily from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska’s North Slope to the port at Valdez.
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