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Wellington residents seek answers following massive gasoline spill from Sunoco pipeline

Wednesday, January 18, 2012
WELLINGTON, Ohio - As crews continued the round the clock cleanup Monday night of the 116,760 gallons of gasoline that spilled from an 8-inch pipeline last Thursday, concerned residents gathered a short distance away at Wellington High School in search of answers.

From Sunoco Logistics Vice President of Operations Dave Justin, though, first came an apology. 

"To all the resident's who we've displaced and to all the people we've impacted and to this community I want to apologize," said Justin. "That is our pipe, I'm responsible for it, we're responsible for the product that's in it, we're now responsible for the product that's gotten out and we're responsible for all  the impacts it has caused." 

The U.S. EPA outlined for residents the round the clock work that has been going on since Thursday to clean the site and make it safe for the roughly 70 displaced residents to return. A process that would have been much more intensive had it not been for the quick actions of the Wellington Fire Department. 

"I've worked a lot of these spills," U.S. EPA Incident Commander Jeff Lippert. "I've never seen a local response like it. They cut it off at the neck nothing got down river, it's all contained in a ditch, nothing made it out to a navigable waterway, they saved the day in my opinion." 

But even still, they explained it's not safe for residents immediately adjacent to the spill site to return to their homes because the levels of benzene in the air continue to be too high. The acceptable level from the dangerous vapor is 6 parts per billion. They've had readings at the site as high as 65 parts per billion. 

Lippert explained the readings would remain higher than normal as long as the contaminated soil was present and that they hope to have the excavation complete sometime Wednesday. 

Lippert also expressed concern of the rain hitting the area late Monday and Tuesday so they had Sunoco dig a trench around the site. "Any runoff that's going to come off the site or come from this saturated soil that they're in the process of excavating now, was going to get collected in this ditch." 

Displaced residents expressed concerns about when they might be able to return to their homes and over the long-term impact on their property and possibly their health. 

Pat Cypher and her husband have had enough.
"Do you know what it's like when you don't have enough clothes? I'm staying with my son, he's got two bedrooms I'm sleeping on a love seat," she said. "Yes we could go to a motel but that's not near our home." 

Doris Gray doesn't like being away from her home either, but can't help but feel lucky that she'll at least have a house to go home to whenever that is.

"We would have been incinerated," she said thinking about if there had been some type of spark. "So I think we're so fortunate." 

The pipeline sits 3 to 5 feet below ground and runs near Toledo to Western Pennsylvania. It was installed in 1952 and was last inspected with an internal camera in 2007. It's examined every five years and was scheduled to be inspected again next month. So far, crews have not been able to get close enough to the damaged pipe itself to determine what caused the spill because of the level of fumes in the immediate area.