Lake Michigan Refinery Oil Discharge: Latest Update

The Coast Guard informs that their representatives together with those from the Environmental Protection Agency were back on scene Wednesday to oversee cleanup operations after a crude oil discharge Monday evening at the BP Whiting Refinery in Whiting.

Eight members of a shoreline cleanup assessment team, consisting of members of both agencies and BP, inspected the shoreline to verify presence of crude oil and to recommend cleanup techniques as required.

The SCAT team inspected the shoreline for about three hours and saw minimal oiling of the shoreline and recommended a small crew to manually remove crude oil along the shoreline.

Weather and wind conditions improved overnight, which allowed teams to redeploy boom as a precautionary measure.
The exact volume of oil released is still undetermined. Based on initial visual inspections, BP’s incident management team provided an estimate of between of 9-18 barrels on Wednesday morning so that environmental modelling could begin.

BP continues to perform engineering analyses to determine the amount of oil discharged into the lake and will revise estimates as updated information becomes available.