Stuff and Nonsense

Aug. 1, 2012 at 5:53am with 6 notes

I know people don’t think of Wisconsin as having anything to do with oil, but we do. We have refineries, tank farms and I don’t know what all else.

We’ve had two pipeline failures in the past five or six weeks. The first failure was of a gasoline pipeline. About 55,000 gallons of gasoline was pumped out into the ground before they got the thing shut down. Several homes are now without water due to contamination. The only thing they can use the water for is flushing toilets. It’s contaminated with benzene, a rather nasty little chemical. The last I heard, something like twelve wells were effected. The water can’t be used for anything, not drinking, not washing clothes, not even for watering lawns. They’ve been digging up contaminated soil trying to clean it up, but the stuff is already down in the water table.

Now we’ve had a crude oil spill. A pipeline carrying oil from the Dakotas to a refinery ruptured. Something like 50,000 - 60,000 gallons of crude escaped, shooting a 1,000 feet into the air showering down on neighboring farm fields and coating a nearby house with crude.

Now, would some of Wisconsin’s politicians who were pushing so hard for the Keystone pipeline like to repeat to me their statements about how safe pipelines are, how it isn’t going to damage the environment, how it isn’t going to contaminate water supplies? Hmm? How about it, Scotty? Paul? How about it?