Heather Houk was at work one December afternoon when her husband called to say they had to evacuate their house. By the time she returned to their 3-acre property on the Florida Mesa around 5 p.m., firefighters had arrived.
In the ditch abutting her neighbor’s driveway off County Road 219, a pool of liquid had accumulated and was bubbling up from the ground’s surface like an artesian well. The liquid ran south, parallel to County Road 219 in an apron across Riverview Ranch Road toward Houk’s property.
“The smell like almost takes you off your feet because it’s just that refined gasoline,” she said.
An underground pipeline owned by Enterprise Products Partners carrying car fuel from Texas up through New Mexico, into Colorado and on to Wyoming had burst, just 250 feet from the well the Houks use to drink.
The Dec. 5 spill was first reported in a rough estimate by first responders simply to be over 1,000 gallons of gasoline. Over time that estimate grew to 371 barrels (15,600 gallons), then to 544 barrels (22,900 gallons) – enough to fill the Durango Community Recreation Center’s 23-person hot tub nearly six times over.
Houk ran into the house before they, and several of their neighbors, evacuated to a hotel that night.
“The smell was so overwhelming,” she said. “It was like just covering our faces, holding our breath, and grabbing a handful of clothes and toiletries and stuff, and throwing everything in a bag for my husband, my son and I, and just getting the hell out of there.”
After three or four nights in a hotel, the neighbors had returned home and the Houks decided to try moving back into theirs. But by the middle of the next day, Houk was dizzy and had severe headaches. It felt like a severe hangover.
Enterprise had trucks and excavation equipment running at all hours of the day outside the house as they quickly tried to remove the contaminated soil and replace a 100-foot section of the buried pipe.
A few miles down the road from the Houks’ property, Patrick Goddard, owner of Rainbow Springs Trout Farm, was oblivious to the commotion occurring on County Road 219.
On Dec. 10, he got a call from a friend, a fish biologist with the state, curious about how his fish were doing.
“Well, now that you mentioned it, dude, I’ve had more mortalities in the last couple weeks than I’ve had in 20 years of me doing this,” he told his friend.
About 80,000 fingerlings that just left their egg sacs had died over the previous week. It was a die-off of unprecedented scale.
“I’ve never seen a loss this abrupt,” Goddard said.
Samples from his spring – which he suspects is hydrologically connected to the same aquifer from which the Houks’ well draws – don’t indicate any contamination. On Friday, Enterprise informed Goddard it would not compensate him for the loss of his fish, which would have yielded up to $100,000 at market.
But Goddard suspects the worst of the contamination may have passed before samples were taken, and the sensitive young fish were a harbinger of the pollution. The fish farmer can’t explain the mass death any other way.
“Fish are kind of your canary in the coal mine,” he said. “The fish are gonna have problems before it’s even detectable.”
The spill was first reported at 4:30 p.m., when Houk’s neighbor called 911.
Within hours, officials with the company, the state of Colorado and federal authorities and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe had been made aware.
The report provided to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment says the pipeline was shut down immediately after notification of the company, however, it is unknown for how long the pipeline had been leaking.
The rapid contamination of domestic wells that draw from water about 90 feet under the surface – contaminant levels had spiked in samples taken Dec. 8 – yields few clues in the way of determining when the leak may have begun, experts say.
Enterprise provided a boilerplate statement in response to multiple requests for an interview saying it was working with impacted residents to supply clean water and implement long-term solutions while it also continued soil and water testing in conjunction with regulatory officials.
A company spokesman did not provide answers to specific questions sent via email by deadline Friday afternoon, including when any pipeline sensors may have first indicated a loss of pressure.
It remains unclear what caused the spill, although corrosion is the leading cause of pipeline failures nationally.
“It’s a very large spill,” said Colleen Brisnehan, hazardous waste program manager with CDPHE. “It’s definitely a large spill that we’ll be responding to for years.”
Her office is responsible for overseeing the environmental response. This is the largest gasoline spill that CDPHE has responded to in the last five years, said an agency spokesman. Crude oil spills are more common, Brisnehan said.
Most gasoline spills occur when an underground tank at gas stations leaks some of its contents. However, this spill was abnormally large – the equivalent contents of two of those underground tanks was emptied into the earth.
Since the spill occurred, Enterprise has removed 2,727 cubic yards of contaminated dirt – enough dirt to fill the Durango recreation center’s lap pool one and half times.
“There is still significant impact underground, but it will eventually either be treated or it will degrade through time,” Brisnehan said.
Sampling shows contamination in nine domestic wells, three of which have contaminant concentrations that exceed the state’s drinking water standards.
The Houks’ well is the most severely impacted, according to a Jan. 14 filing with CDPHE.
The family’s drinking well contained 300 parts per billion of benzene on Dec. 12, according to filings with the state. The contaminant is tied to increased risk of cancer and has a maximum allowable level in drinking water of 5 parts per billion, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and was among several gasoline-associated contaminants with levels that exceeded federal benchmarks for health and safety by an exponential factor.
It was not immediately clear last week whether Enterprise would be fined.
Two months later, Heather and Wayne Houk are still living in a short-term rental, courtesy of Enterprise. Contractors are busy drilling test wells on their property to monitor the contamination.
Many of the Houks’ neighbors have accepted the company’s offer to install cisterns to use in lieu of their wells and or filtration systems. Heather and Wayne have held off.
The couple return to the property twice each day to feed their animals. They still can’t spend much time inside the house.
Brisnehan remains optimistic that the contaminated wells can be restored and filtered so that the water can be consumed. She’s also hopeful that the Houks’ home will be habitable again.
The gasoline can be removed by pumping it out, through vapor extraction and by enhancing the microbes that breakdown the biological material. All three are likely to be a part of remediating this spill.
There are also vapor mitigation systems that can protect residents, like the Houks, from the noxious gasses entering their home.
Enterprise has been accommodating, Heather said (other neighbors give mixed reviews), but the future of their home and the small-scale vegetable farm they run remains in limbo.
“We’re worried, obviously, about the long-term prospects of full remediation,” Heather said. “We’re also kind of hopeful. We’re so data-driven … there’s no point in panicking, there’s no point in freaking out, because we don’t know what we don’t know.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
