California responds to Yellowstone spill

A team of five oil-spill experts from California made the trip out to Montana recently to help crews respond to the oil spill that dumped an estimated 1,000 barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River on July 1, according to a Governor’s Office press release.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s office dispatched an incident manager, a pipeline-technical specialist, a response-operations manager, an environmental specialist and a shoreline-assessment expert from the California Department of Fish and Game’s (DFG) Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR), after receiving a request for assistance from the state of Montana. The team will spend two weeks there, and California will be reimbursed for its help.

The break occurred in a 12-inch ExxonMobil pipeline about 20 miles upstream of Billings, Mont.

Seventy DFG employees were sent to assist in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year, said Scott D. Schaefer, acting administrator of the OSPR.