Much of the soil in Oklahoma, including the Keystone XL route, is red clay -- a porous substance that makes foundations settle and basements and underground tornado shelters leak."That's the reason we don't have basements," said Tom Bennett of Tulsa, past president of the National Storm Shelter Association. In greater Oklahoma City, which includes Moore, only 3.5 percent of homes have basements, according to Reuters.
So: if the soil of Oklahoma is unsuitable for storm shelters, mightn't it also be unsuitable for a pipeline carrying toxic sludge?
The Keystone XL pipeline would carry diluted bitumen, or "dilbit".
This photo, from National Geographic, show the effect of more than a million gallons of dilbit leaking into Michigan's Kalamazoo River in July 2010. NatGeo:
Dilbit carries hazardous chemicals such as cancer-causing benzene and toxic heavy metals such as arsenic. Because it also contains particles of sand, the environmental groups say, dilbit is much more corrosive than oil alone, thus more likely to cause leaks.
Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, a co-author of a recent report by the Defense Council, said that piping dilbit is "like sandblasting the inside of the pipe", making pipes 16 times more likely to leak than when they are carrying regular crude oil.
An OKC resident tweeted this today:
Looks to me like it is also why you shouldn't have Keystone XL running just 70 miles to the east of this location.
UPDATE: Oh, I know...once in a lifetime event, different location, etc. So, here is a picture from 6 weeks ago of storm flooding from a location about 60 miles to EAST of the pipeline route. In other words: the Cromwell portion of the pipeline runs between the locations of the tweet and this photo. Think the soil conditions there are somehow magically different?
HT Tulsa Station 2
It is a bad idea no matter when you look at it and from any direction.