Pipeline spills are not the exception in Alberta, they are an oily reality, Since 2006, province’s pipelines have spilled the equivalent of almost 28 million litres of oil

Pipeline spills are not the exception in Alberta, they are an oily reality, Since 2006, province’s pipelines have spilled the equivalent of almost 28 million litres of oil by Stephen Hume, June 14, 2012, Vancouver Sun
When a smiling Alberta Premier Alison Redford describes last week’s pipeline spill of 475,000 litres of oil into a pristine river as an “exception,” she is serving up unadulterated spin. … Sean Kheraj, a York University history professor, has been crunching the official numbers and posting his startling findings about the grimy past of the pipeline industry. He has pored over the dryasdust jargon, arcane acronyms and metrics sufficiently complicated that one must assume the unspoken intent of regulatory bodies is to discourage ordinary folk from finding out what’s really going on. For example, Kheraj notes that Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board calculates the frequency of pipeline accidents by comparing the number of failures to the total length of the pipeline system. This is both weird and confusing. Why use distance to measure intervals of time? … And why must a lay citizen develop the skills of a forensic auditor or a cryptographer just to find how many pipeline accidents occur over what duration of time and what the cumulative releases of oil or gas are to the environment? … Between 1990 and 2005, the Alberta Energy Utilities Board recorded more than 16,000 “releases” by pipelines, of which more than half involved hydrocarbons and roughly 30 per cent were “hydrocarbon liquid,” which would mean oil or distillates. Since 2006, Kheraj notes, pipeline ruptures number in the thousands and have spilled the equivalent of at least almost 28 million litres of oil. In 2010 alone, he observes, pipelines in Alberta carrying either oil or some combination of oil, gas or distillates failed on average every 1.4 days and they spilled roughly 3.4 million litres of oil.