Five years later, Walsh County officials see no long-term impacts to site of Keystone Pipeline oil spill

Yahoo

28-05-2025

May 28—EDINBURG, N.D. — It's been a few months past five years since a spill from the Keystone Pipeline in Walsh County washed about five acres of wetlands in around 383,000 gallons of crude oil. The main thing two county leaders remember about the incident was not the spill itself, but the work put in to correct the damage.
Denny Skorheim, a Walsh County commissioner who was on the commission at the time of the spill, said the cleanup and how it was handled was flawless.
"I did a follow-up a year, a couple years after and at that time I said, 'they could run a pipeline across my land any time they wanted,' because I have absolute faith in the way they handled that whole operation," he said.
The spill occurred on Oct. 29, 2019, when a rupture occurred in the pipeline that spilled the crude oil into wetlands outside Edinburg. It is one of the largest crude oil spills in North Dakota history. Recently, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration released an investigation report for the incident that said the root issue behind the spill could partially have been "ineffective quality control" and inadequate inspections at the Berg Steel Mill in Panama City, Florida, the producer of the damaged piece of pipeline.
In 2020, TC Energy, the Canadian company that operated the pipeline at the time, paid a fine of about $52,000 to the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality for the spill. The cost was made up of an administrative penalty and environmental emergency cost recovery fee. TC Energy turned its oil pipeline business into a new company called South Bow Energy last year, and the pipeline is active under the new operators.
Skorheim said TC Energy met with the county commission and went through the whole cleanup process, and the commission turned it all over to TC Energy. To Skorheim's knowledge, there haven't been any complaints about the land affected and there has been no lasting impact from the spill.
"There was not one thing I could fault them for on anything," he said. "Obviously the break happened, but as far as the response and cleanup and their handling and managing of the whole operation. ... It was just flawless. Nothing but good to say about the way they handled it."
Walsh County Sheriff Ron Jurgens remembered how his office helped keep people away from the affected area and controlled traffic while TC Energy went to work reclaiming the area. He remembered the smell of the oil in the ground, but the main thing he took away from the incident was how the company went about cleaning up the mess.
"They hauled out all the old, oil soaked ground and reclaimed it and remade it," he said. "It's really much better than it was before."