Earlier this week it was reported that a train spilled about 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel near the town of Sidney, Illinois (about 15 miles southeast of Champaign). A lot of it apparently ended up in a creek, a tributary of the Salt Fork River. No reports of dead fish yet, but it smelled pretty bad. That story got me wondering, how much oil gets spilled annually?
According to the website livescience, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that about 1.3 million gallons of petroleum are spilled into U.S. waters in a typical year, from pipelines, vessels (ships, trains, trucks), and leaky underground storage tanks. However, a major spill like the Deepwater Horizon dwarfs this number; it was estimated that the total discharge from that disaster was 210 million gallons.
From a groundwater perspective, leaky underground storage tanks (known by the lovely acronym LUSTs) are of most concern. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a major program to deal with LUSTs. A study in 2008 estimated that of the approximately one million underground storage tanks sites in the U.S., about half had leaks. Yuck.
