Those "little" oil spills really add up

And there are a lot of them.

On (June 9), an oil spill into the St. Mary’s River at the Ontario, Canada-Michigan border halted boat traffic between Lake Superior and Lake Huron for about three hours. This spill is small, relative to the massive incidents that usually make the news. Spills of this scale rarely make headlines, and that’s a problem: Small events are the large majority of oil spills, and together they have a big impact.

5,300 gallons of oil originating from Algoma Steel fell into the river at around 10:30 am, according to a press release from the U.S. Coast Guard.

...Spills like this happen all the time. The overwhelming majority of oil spills don’t show up in headlines at all. There are thousands of instances of oil leaking, oozing, pouring, and, yes, spilling into U.S. waters every year...

Sure, the St. Mary’s River spill is no Deepwater Horizon. But maybe all these small(er) spills should be big(er) news. It’s difficult to find reliable and comprehensive data on smaller spills. As far as Gizmodo can tell, there is no centralized tracker that shows volumes for all oil spill incidents that occur in the United States. But NOAA does keep tabs on a lot of spills via its incident tracker, which covers “selected oil spills off US coastal waters and other incidents.”

So far, in 2022 alone, NOAA has recorded more than 50 recorded oil incidents. Of that 50, the 45+ below both the ITOPF and NOAA thresholds have cumulatively spilled a potential 234,220 gallons of oil into our waterways. - Earther