More than 5,000 people in the rural Montana city of Glendive have been told not to use municipal water because elevated levels of cancer-causing benzene were found downstream from a weekend crude oil spill in the Yellowstone River.
Officials said they were distributing fresh water that is being brought into the city after a warning was posted for the residents not to drink or cook with the city water because of the high level of benzene, which has a sweet odor and could be a health danger over the long term.
“It sucks,” Wesley Henderson, a 36-year-old oil field worker, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He said he bought 5 gallons of water after his wife noticed a strange odor coming from their tap water.
“I didn’t find out about the advisory until after I’d been drinking it,” Henderson said. “My stomach hurt all day yesterday. I don’t know if that was just in my mind.”
According to the 2010 Census, Glendive is a city of about 5,000 people about 40 miles west of the North Dakota border. It is the seat of Dawson County in the farming country of eastern Montana near Makoshika State Park.
On Saturday, about 1,200 barrels of crude oil, approximately 50,000 gallons, leaked from the 12-inch Poplar Pipeline near where the line crosses the Yellowstone River near Glendive. The spill seeped into the river and contaminated the city’s water supply, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
“The initial results of samples taken from the City of Glendive’s drinking water system indicate the presence of hydrocarbons at elevated levels, and water intakes in the river have been closed,” the EPA said in a statement.
The pipeline is owned by Bridger Pipeline, a subsidiary of True Cos., a privately held Wyoming company. The pipeline was shut down within an hour of the discovery of the leak and more than 50 people are working to clean up the spill, the company said.
