NC Regulators Take Colonial Pipeline To Court Over 1.3 Million Gallon Spill
NCDEQ seeks injunction forcing Colonial to comply with the State's demands for additional data and testing stemming from their historic spill in Huntersville, NC last year.
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality filed a complaint in Mecklenberg County Superior Court seeking injunctive relief against Colonial Pipeline Company stemming from the 1.3 million gallon pipeline leak in Huntersville, NC last August. The complaint aims to make the state judiciary to compel Colonial to provide a laundry list of data to regulators, most of which the company has repeatedly refused to provide, such as an updated overall volume estimate of the release which stands currently as the second largest inland pipeline spill in US history—and NCDEQ believes it will surpass the previous record of 1.68 million gallons (Minnesota, 1991) before all is said and done, according to the document.
The motion document filed in court this morning states that Colonial has failed to provide the Department with statutorily mandated, essential information to the size of the spill, adding that such information is essential to planning and directing cleanup activities and abating the substantial harm to both people and environment. DEQ also asserts that the company has failed to adequately delineate the vertical extent of the contamination (how deep it goes), and even goes as far as stating Colonial is using their cleanup equipment lackadaisically. “Colonial is not operating the hydraulic control wells at the site to the maximum feasible extent.” The purpose of the hydraulic wells keep the groundwater contamination from expanding further into the soil, and the State alleges in the filing that by not running their equipment at optimum levels, Colonial is increasing the likelihood that the contamination will indeed spread.
The spill in Huntersville occurred in August 2020, when two teenagers riding ATVs through the Oehler Nature Preserve discovered the leak and reported it to local authorities. Because of Colonial’s outdated leak detection method, the leak was active for days, possibly weeks prior to being detected and repaired, leading to a saga involving state regulators asking questions that Colonial claims they can’t answer. According to the complaint, Colonial Pipeline is still pulling petroleum out of the ground at an average rate of 1,000 gallons per day, and at the time of the complaints writing, more than 1.3 million gallons of gas had been recovered from the site. It’s also worth mentioning that in their most recent report on the spill to federal regulators prior to their settlement, Colonial had stated they had “lost” approximately 170,000 gallons—and even if that number is conservative, it could still place the current known volume at up to 1.47 million gallons.
Another interesting allegation is one regarding a discrepancy some of Colonial’s filing procedures. According to the court filing, Colonial Pipeline has provided regulators with documents from off-site facilities which detail the volume of petroleum being moved away from the spill site and into the facilities possession. However, these facilities’ are reporting volumes that exceed what Colonial themselves had reported to the State. “To date, Colonial has not adequately explained the reason for this discrepancy”, the document states.
On October 19, NCDEQ issued its fourth Notice of Continuing Violation to Colonial Pipeline Company regarding their response (or lack thereof) to the departments inquiries, yet again requesting an updated volume and vertical plume estimates, and nine days letter, Colonial’s environmental director Sam McEwen emailed NCDEQ director Michael Scott with the company’s refusal to do so—yet again stating that in order to provide such information, the company would have to shut down clean up operations for 4-6 months, and that the methods they would have to employ would lead to results that contained a high degree of uncertainty as to their accuracy.
McEwen also rebuffed DEQ’s notion as to a volume estimate’s importance. “Contrary to NCDEQ’s statements, an estimate of volume of product released is not needed for successful remediation at this site”, McEwen writes, continuing, “the risks created by stopping remediation activities to conduct additional rounds of data collection for yet another volume estimate greatly outweigh any minimal benefit that a revised volume estimate would provide”. According to the information in the filing, the groundwater contamination extends 11 acres in extent, and that in the absence of appropriate remediation efforts, that groundwater will continue to expand deeper into the larger aquifer the nature preserve sits on.
NC DEQ is also alleging that Colonial has failed to adequately investigate the extent of contamination from polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) resulting from the discharge and the company’s ensuing cleanup activities. These substances, used in this case as an explosion suppressant, have been shown to be harmful to humans, with growing consensus that they could lead to various illnesses, having been found linked to conditions such as thyroid disease, liver damage and even cancer in some cases. Per the court filing, DEQ requested Colonial perform tests at the site to determine if PFAS were present, a request which Colonial allegedly resisted—so the department decided to do it themselves, adding that while there are no current health-based regulatory limits for most PFAS, the concentrations discovered in some drainage and storm water ditches around the site were higher than the EPA drinking water health advisory amount, and even more PFAS constituents from the surrounding groundwater exceeding the state’s “practical quantitation limit”.
The state’s requested intervention by the courts are set on compelling Colonial to not only clean up every source of petroleum and PFAS present at the site, but also to provide the state with a myriad of yet unreported information, including a current, revised volume estimate; an updated and much more comprehensive Conceptual Site Model; an explanation regarding the petroleum removal discrepancies; and provide GPS coordinates of every repair similar to the one that aged and failed (creating the leak) throughout the entirety of Colonial Pipeline’s system that runs through North Carolina. The state is also requesting a full, extensive evaluation of Colonial’s leak detection system, which the company has itself described as inadequate to detect such a leak.
North Carolina regulators are taking a much harder approach than their federal counterparts at the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which after releasing a report condemning the entire 5,500 mile Colonial Pipeline system as a risk the public and environmental safety with the potential for catastrophic spills present throughout the line, let Colonial practically off the hook with a quietly brokered settlement which included no fines or further litigation.
“Colonial owes it to the people of North Carolina to cooperate with DEQ and be forthcoming with the information required by our statutes, starting with an accurate estimate of how much fuel was released into the environment,” said DEQ Secretary Elizabeth S. Biser in a press release. “DEQ is committed to holding Colonial accountable and we now seek a court order directing Colonial to comply with their obligations to cleanup and restore the communities impacted by the release.”
The complaint filed in the courts do not preclude DEQ from assessing any civil penalties related to the violations, nor does it exempt Colonial from any further enforcement actions to possibly be brought forward by the department. You can view the full complaint here.