BALTIMORE — The water no longer looks red in the Harbor East marina after 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel spilled into the harbor on Wednesday morning, but you can still see a sheen on the water's surface, and you can still smell the fuel.
"We were just walking along and we're like, what is that smell and what are these police lines?" Luke Minor told WMAR-2 News. He's visiting from Washington state for a conference here in Baltimore. "We definitely care about the environment where we live, so it's really unfortunate when this sort of stuff happens. So I hope they're just able to get a get a handle on it."
The spill happened during a routine fuel delivery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Two diesel tanks that supply fuel to the backup generator at the patient care facility in East Baltimore were accidentally overfilled. That fuel leaked into the storm drain system, and then into the harbor.
Hear from city officials as cleanup efforts continue following 2,000 gallon diesel fuel spill in Baltimore's harbor
Officials say there's no impact to the drinking water. The water was red due to dye in the diesel fuel.
“The Coast Guard and the contractor are using oil absorbent materials and skimmers that feed into a 4000 gallon pump truck. That also includes in addition to the over 100 personnel who have worked through the night. That includes the fact that we have three skimmers out here. We have six vac trucks. We have 1000 ft of sweep, and we have 600 ft of boom already deployed,” Governor Wes Moore said during an early morning press conference on Thursday.
Emergency teams from 10 different city and state agencies, as well as the Coast Guard and its contractor, Miller Environmental Group, have been working around the clock to clean up the spill. It's largely been contained in the marina. Blue Water Baltimore sent a team out earlier to see if any fuel escaped.
"So what we did see is a little bit of sheen on the water beyond the scope of the boom, but that's what the US Coast Guard deems as unrecoverable," Alice Volpitta, Baltimore Harbor waterkeeper for Blue Water Baltimore told WMAR-2 News.
All day, crews have been flushing the storm drain system, pushing the fuel into the harbor where skimmers can capture it. Right now, it's a race against the threat of rain.
"That's why we're doing the flush the way we are right now. We want to control that - we want to force that flow, but we want to do it in a controlled manner," Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said Thursday morning. "Should this happen, and rain come behind it, we're gonna lose control - in the worst case scenario. But right now, as I said, we're absolutely on schedule."
Chief Wallace couldn't give a timeline for when the clean-up will be complete, however: "We could go a week, two weeks without significant rain, and then three weeks from now, get two or three inches of rain in an hour, as we know Baltimore has been prone to do recently, and we can start to see product again. So I think what we have to realize is underground. There's, there's oil, right, it's it's it's attached to the side walls, there's, there's still product there, and until it just has its opportunity to push out, I don't think it would be fair to really put a timeline on that."
"In Baltimore we deal with things like sewage overflows, for example, all the time. And in some ways we get desensitized to these big million gallon spills that are entering our waterways, but then you talk to an out of towner and it's absolutely unthinkable that we would have sewage flowing into our waterways," Volpitta told WMAR-2 News. "And so while this oil spill, this fuel spill isn't ranking up there, say with the Exxon Valdez spill, for example, any amount of diesel fuel in Baltimore's waterways is too much."
Volpitta said this should serve as another wake-up call that the city needs to take a serious look at its underground infrastructure.
"A lot of time and resources and money have been expended on the sanitary sewer system that carries sewage from our toilets to our treatment plants, and less funding and resources have been expended maintaining the stormwater system," she said. "So it's a completely separate pipe under our feet, but it's really important and it's a major conduit for pollution in cases like this."
There are a lot of road closures near the site of the spill, and near Johns Hopkins near Fayette and Orleans Streets. Officials are asking drivers to stay away from the Harbor East area if possible until the work is complete.
Jacki Gilbert with the Friends of the Canton Library was disappointed to have to cancel an educational program at the marina scheduled for Thursday night. The focus was, ironically, healthy habitats.
"This is the Chesapeake watershed and Canton is right along the waterfront. We’ve got to take care of this because I know they have an event coming up to jump in the harbor, to swim in the harbor. I won't be there," Gilbert said, laughing. "But we'd like to see possible again. We want to see the ecology come back and be healthy and have bees and birds and butterflies in our neighborhoods."
Mayor Brandon Scott was asked about upcoming Harbor Splash event during the Thursday morning press conference. The event is scheduled for June 21. Last year was the first Harbor Splash, when the city celebrated the fact that the harbor is clean and safe enough to be swimmable.
"We'll see, we'll see. We know that folks are very excited about doing that just a little further up upstream, but we'll see what happens," Mayor Scott told reporters.
The mayor was also asked about potential fines for anyone found responsible for the spill.
He said, "All of that, all of those things about fines and costs and all that will be determined later. Right now the focus and the most important thing is that we're actually making sure that we get the water clean, get the stuff out of the system, all of that we can talk to you guys about at a later time."
