Car accident shuts major US oil pipeline for days
By EDWARD WELSCH
A major oil pipeline will be shut down for several days after a spill and fire near Chicago caused by a freak car accident.
A Chevrolet SUV and a Ford Mustang crashed into each other and hit a small above-ground section of an Enbridge oil pipeline in an industrial park in New Lenox, Ill., causing a spill and fire that killed two people and injured three.
The pipeline was shut down within hours of the accident early Saturday morning and will remain shut down until Thursday morning, an Enbridge spokeswoman said.
The outage could worsen an already constrained oil distribution system between Canada and the U.S. and send the prices for Canadian oil lower.
Canada's access to buyers in the US has been limited as storage and refining space in the Midwest has been filled by surging production in Canada and the western US.
The downed Enbridge Line 14/64 pipeline normally transports 317,000 bpd of oil along Enbridge's Lakehead System, which is the largest crude oil pipeline to the US from the US's largest supplier, Canada.
Line 14/64 connects oil storage in Superior, Wis., to refiners near Griffith, Ind. Enbridge's Line 6A, which transports 670,000 bpd of oil, also runs between Superior and Griffith, and will be operational.
Line 14 will be restarted Wednesday evening and Line 14 Thursday morning, the Enbridge spokeswoman said.
It's not clear how much oil was released. The pipeline was leaking for about three hours before it was shut down, but that most of the spilled oil was burned in the fire, Illinois Emergency Management Agency spokesman Harold Damron said.
The rest was contained with a roughly 150-square-foot area on Enbridge's property, he said.
The two cars appear to have been drag-racing in the isolated industrial park where the crash happened, Will County Deputy Sheriff Ken Kaupas said.
"They may have just run out of road, and unfortunately at the end of this road is where the Enbridge pipeline is exposed," he said.
Most of Enbridge's Line 14/64 is underground - the cars hit a roughly 30- to 40-foot section that is above ground and surrounded by chain link fence.
Kaupas said that two people in the Mustang died at the scene and the coroner's office was working to identify the bodies.
Two of three people in the SUV were severely burned and all three are being treated at the Loyola University Burn Center in Chicago, he said. It's not clear whether either driver had been intoxicated.
"The heat was so intense from the fire, that literally one of the vehicles was welded to the pipe," Kaupas said.
The accident is the worst Enbridge accident since a 2010 spill that leaked about 20,000 bbl of oil in Michigan's Kalamazoo River.
That spill was followed that year by a smaller accident on Line 6A in Romeoville, Ill.
Dow Jones Newswires
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