Boulder County Public Health: Spill not a threat to human health
Randy Hicks’ friend knew something was wrong when he saw the Boulder Creek water flowing underneath and east of the 17th Street overpass Wednesday afternoon.
“He was like ‘man, there was a whole bunch of gas floating down the creek,'” Hicks said. “I was running down there just to see what it was, how thick it was, how bad it was.”
Boulder Police at 2:40 p.m. responded to a diesel spill, seeping into the creek steps west of the overpass.
Officer J. Luebke was one of the first officers on the scene.
“We could smell it,” Luebke said. “The more East you came, the stronger it got.”
Luebke said he has lived in Boulder for 28 years and could not remember another diesel spill in the creek.
“This is a sickening smell,” Luebke said. “The last (time) that we had that sickening (a smell), we had a dead body there, a few months ago.”
The spill came from New Design Construction, a company working on the CU campus, said Jim Stout, of the City of Boulder Water Quality.
“They were filling one of their vehicles, and it ran into a storm sewer that’s right over on the other side of (the 17th Street Bridge) and then immediately came down and went into the creek,” Stout said.
Pam Milmoe, from Boulder Public Health, arrived on scene at 4 p.m.
She said that the only threat is to the health of the river’s ecosystem.
“As for people, health is not an issue,” Milmoe said.
When clean-up crews arrived later that evening, their focus was to stop further contamination, Stout said.
“Right now what they’re doing is trying to contain it so that there won’t be any more damage this evening,” Stout said. “Then what they’ll come out and do tomorrow is scrub all the infected area and then with the contaminated water, they’ll suck that up into a vacuum truck and haul it off site.”
The amount of diesel spilled was not known as of Wednesday evening, Stout added.
“They should have records with their diesel truck,” Stout said. “They’re supposed to subtract out every time they fill a piece of equipment like that.”
New Design Construction will be responsible for the expensive cost of cleanup, although there was no way of predicting the exact cost as of Wednesday, Stout added.
“This was a rare case that we actually caught the people that were doing it,” Stout said. “More often than not, it falls on the city and the county to pick up the bill for clean-ups because more often than not we don’t know who did it.”
New Design Construction was issued a citation by CUPD for discharge into the storm water utility system, according to a press release issued by CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard.
The company has a court date set for the week after Thanksgiving, Milmoe said. “I believe they will potentially be facing fines.”
Hicks, who works nearby at Rocky Mountain Anglers, said he is concerned the relatively low level of the creek will make for increased danger.
“It wouldn’t have been so bad probably if it happened in the spring time or in the summer time when the water is high – it would kind of just flush downstream really fast,” Hicks said. “I guess what I’m saying is the contamination is higher now because the flow of the creek is a little bit lower.”
As a fisherman, Hicks said he is worried about the spill’s affects on the area’s wildlife.
“It’d be a shame to see something like this one little incident knock the fish out from 17th Street down,” Hicks said.
