Expansion
The pump station had a 15-foot-wide service road 1,000 feet long. By the third day, inbound and outbound tankers, the arrival of more frac tanks, and a major rainstorm created traffic jams. Enbridge hired a contractor to build roads and expand the area to accommodate 128 frac tanks. Taplin assumed command of fugitive dust management, including watering roads and sweeping streets.
To integrate road construction with tank farm activities, Taplin brought in a portable radio tower and equipped his people with radios. They numbered tanks and marked their locations on a map. “We tracked everything very closely,” he says. “It was a logistics nightmare.”
As cleanup progressed, the water in the oil-water mixture increased beyond the percentage accepted by the Griffith facility. “Frac tanks have valves at various levels for dewatering,” says Taplin. “My people installed a length of clear tubing in the vacuum hose so they could close the valve as soon as they saw oil coming through.”
The water, stored in specific frac tanks, was filtered through a carbon treatment system to remove dissolved hydrocarbons before being transported to a nonhazardous disposal facility. Oil skimmed from the frac tanks was consolidated in different tanks for transport to Griffith.
“I had six 3,000-gallon vacuum trucks just pulling water and skimming oil,” says Taplin. “In one shift, tankers brought in 275,000 gallons.” To improve efficiency, Taplin’s workers built a header system using hundreds of feet of hose, valves, and clear tubes to pump water to the carbon treatment unit and free the badly needed vacuum trucks.
Notable Achievements
Meanwhile, a crew at Heritage Park on the east side of Battle Creek skimmed oil nonstop using one of three Vactor combination sewer cleaning machines from Federal Signal Corp. They worked for more than a month to remediate the site, one of the first to pass inspection.
A notable contribution to the cleanup was Terra’s Sed-Vac, a system that works with a Guzzler industrial vacuum loader pulling 5,300 cfm at 28-inch Hg. It enables crews to reach out into a waterway and vacuum oil off the surface.
“We run the 8-inch vacuum hose to a special head that replaces the bucket on our long-reach – 65 feet – Komatsu excavator,” says Taplin. “The head has a horizontal metal pipe for attaching the hose, then a 90-degree fitting to a vertical pipe.”
The Sed-Vac worked at a flume – pipes that allowed the creek to flow through, but trapped the oil. The Guzzler ran continuously for two weeks, while vacuum loaders pulled off the oil and transported it to the tank farm.
“Enbridge didn’t mess around when it came to repairing the pipe,” says Taplin. “The infrastructure they built to reach the marshy area was awesome. They cut trees and shrubs, then laid thousands of 4- by 25-foot-long hardwood crane mats 12 inches thick for roads.”
The Sed-Vac worked alongside the excavators as they dug a sizable hole 10 feet deep to expose the broken line. Taplin then replaced the Guzzler with two Vactor 2100 PD combination machines to keep the hole dry as workers drove in sheet piling and replaced the bad section. The operation took two weeks.
Oil that sat for a while sank. A subcontractor dredged the submerged contaminated sediment and dewatered it in synthetic tubes. Meanwhile, Taplin’s crew ran the collected water through a treatment plant before pumping it into the river.
In September, Enbridge had a smaller oil spill in Romeoville, Ill. Taplin dispatched 30 employees and equipment to do the same duties. They finished in late October.
Winding Down
Every piece of equipment used in the cleanup was decontaminated. Taplin assigned 40 men to run the largest of the operations. Cleaning crews used a high-pressure trailer-mounted waterblaster from NLB Corp. A multi-gun valve enabled them to run nine lances simultaneously, with the machine pumping 50 gpm at 3,500 psi. A boiler heated the water to 100 degrees F, then cleaning solution was incorporated into the flow.
“Everything received a tracking number so owners could reclaim it,” says Taplin. “My people were constantly moving equipment in and out. They even repackaged and shrink-wrapped booms for pickup.” Work on the site was still ongoing as of late January 2011.
