Study: Oil spills a frequent risk to inland areas of Midwest

June 4, 2012

Even though the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters have grabbed the headlines, oil spills hit land much more frequently, posing risks for lakes, streams and rivers.

That's especially true near pipelines, suggests a study in the current issue of the journal Risk Analysis that looks for places particularly vulnerable to inland oil spills across the Upper Midwest.

Despite the attention paid to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, which released about 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the majority of oil spills, about 60%, are inland ones. A 30-inch pipe rupture near Marshall, Mich., two years ago, for example, spilled about 19,000 barrels of crude oil into a creek and then the Kalamazoo River, stopping 80 miles short of Lake Michigan.

Read more