Unfortunately it’s not a headline from the Onion… When I went out for a run at Liberty Park today I was greeted by a couple sandwich board style barricades and a few feet of police caution tape, figured there were a couple down branches or something. After running about 30 yards down the trail I was flagged down by one of Salt Lake’s finest who informed me the park was closed, once he realized he was in cop mode he got a friendlier tone and said if I stayed on the woodchip trail that was cool. I asked what was up with the closure, he pondered for a minute then responded with a look as if he couldn’t even believe what he was saying, “the pond is contaminated.”
guess it's a low key closure
There wasn’t too much out of the ordinary at first other than a deserted park on a Saturday afternoon which was odd after about two blocks everything started to come into view.
never thought we'd be seeing this
Turns out a Chevron pipe had been leaking into Red Butte Creek since sometime late friday but apparently wasn’t noticed until this morning. In the meantime oil made it all the way down into the pond at Liberty Park.
According to an article in the Tribune oil streamed into the pond at Liberty Park and continued into the Jordan River. It was spotted as far north as 500 South and so far over 150 birds have been affected. It’s also reported that Chevron started receiving pressure warnings on friday but pretty much didn’t check into it until this morning. If it wasn’t for a damn constructed by a Big D construction crew things could have been even worse.
It’s crazy how Wallyworld can inform a store manager within minutes if a refrigerator door is open for a few minutes but yet it takes these chuckleheads over nine hours to realize they are leaking 50 gallons a minute?? One of the guys on the cleanup crew said he thought the park would be able to get cleaned relatively quickly so that’s good but what about the three plus mile area in between the spill and the park? Who knows what the future holds.
Until then get used to seeing this for a while…
In the meantime, think about it before getting in your car the next time – it’s probably not that far of a bike ride or maybe even walking distance.
