Gasoline is flowing into the Kun River near the community of Scammon Bay after thousands of gallons of fuel leaked from its tank farm. The Village Corporation that operates the tanks is not commenting on the incident at this time, but the City of Scammon Bay and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation are advising people not to fish or hunt near the contaminated area.
You smell it before you see it: a strong odor of gasoline filling the air around an area of open water.
“You could smell, like, fuel; like gas and kind of like stove oil mixed,” said Noel Uttereyuk, who does water and sewer maintenance for the City of Scammon Bay and who was asked to take pictures of the spill. He photographed a rainbow sheen and brown foam. City Administrator Larson Hunter will use the pictures in a public notice.
“We were going to do a Facebook post, just a PSA, letting people know that there is a fuel spill and not to be doing any subsistence gathering down there," Hunter said.
The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation echoes the warning. The state found out about the spill on Monday when residents called the agency to report a strong gasoline odor. ADEC, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, are flying to Scammon Bay on Thursday to investigate.
Lisa Krebs-Barsis with the Department of Environmental Conservation will be on board. She’s been talking with the owners of the tank farm, the Askinuk Village Corporation, about what happened.
“It was a 10,000 gallon tank, but it had 7,000 gallons of gasoline in it that is now no longer in it," Krebs-Barsis said.
Some amount of that 7,000 gallons escaped the tank; some rapidly evaporated; and some found its way into a creek and then into the Kun River. Where the two waterways meet, there’s an area of open water. That’s where the sheen and brown foam can be seen. More gasoline might be trapped beneath the ice, but Krebs-Barsis does not expect the fuel to move very far.
“We would not expect to see impacts all the way out to the Bering Sea," she said. "Gasoline is really volatile, and it dissipates really quickly when it’s not trapped under ice.”
The community says that the ice ends two to three miles away.
“We would not expect to see the gasoline to be spread widely beyond that, if even that far,” Krebs-Barsis said.
When the spill took place is still unknown. The Department of Environmental Conservation advises people to report fuel spills as soon as they occur so that response and cleanup can happen as quickly as possible.
