100,000-gallon red wine spill stains California creek bank. But what about the fish?
Authorities in Northern California continued to work on Friday to clean up a spill that unleashed nearly 100,000 gallons of wine and polluted a local river system this week.
The spill happened Wednesday afternoon when a large blending tank of cabernet sauvignon at Rodney Strong Vineyards in Healdsburg burst, flowing first into Reiman Creek and then into Sonoma County’s Russian River, which ends at the Pacific Ocean, according to state authorities.
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat described the amount of wine that spilled as “enough to fill more than 500,000 bottles,” reporting that the Russian River “flowed with a cherry red tint” following the massive spill.
Fortunately, water levels were high at the time of the spill — and that means the environmental impact wasn’t as drastic as it could have been, according to Eric Laughlin, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Still, a little over 97,000 gallons of red wine were released from the tank, according to figures from an Office of Emergency Services hazardous materials spill update.
“Twenty percent of that was contained before it went into the creek, so the other 80 percent went into the creek,” Laughlin said in a phone interview with McClatchy News on Friday. “We’re not sure exactly how much went into the Russian River, but it was a fraction of that 80 percent that went into the creek.”
Dealing with a spilled liquid such as wine (at least when it’s mixed with water) is much different than dealing with a spill of something such as oil, Laughlin said.
“With something like oil or gasoline or diesel — something that floats on the surface — it would be a worse scenario because the birds would land in the oil that’s floating on the river,” Laughlin said.
“With wine, it dilutes pretty quickly; we could see a change in pH levels or dissolved oxygen that could kill fish, but we believe heavy rains helped with the dilution.”
No fish are believed to have died from the spill, likely thanks to rainwater diluting the wine, Laughlin said.
Sonoma County Fire District Battalion Chief Mike Elson said that now “it’s just a matter of nature taking its course and letting it flow out to the ocean,” the Press Democrat reported.
That’s not to say there wasn’t an environmental impact, though.
Photos released by the Department of Fish and Wildlife show the banks of Reiman Creek stained slightly red following the spill.
“That’s where the focus on cleanup is going forward — removing the residue on the side of the creek,” Laughlin said. “We have an environmental scientist working on cleaning that up without doing further damage to the environment.”
State officials said Rodney Strong and contractors also worked to clean up the spill.
Laughlin said Friday that staff from the winery created a containment dam to try to hold back the wine and used vacuum trucks to try to suck up the wine and water mixture.
“We feel like not that much wine got into the waterway. We are investigating the other tanks. We’ve moved wine out of that area to prevent any future leaks as well,” said Christopher O’Gorman, a spokesman for Rodney Strong, according to KGO.
Laughlin said the water in the area was running fairly high when the wine flowed in, meaning that “once the water dropped a little, the residue clinged to the side of the bank.”
Environmental scientists are developing a plan for that cleanup now.
“We don’t anticipate any future impacts to fish or wildlife,” Laughlin said. “We’ll just continue monitoring the area to get that bank cleaned up.”
Environmental advocates were relieved.
“I’d say this is a case of dodging the bullet,” said Don McEnhill, executive director of nonprofit Russian River Keeper, according to KGO. ”We haven’t had any reports of fish kills, (though) certainly the biochemical oxygen demand and the acidity of the wine is going to kill some smaller insect type things that are fish food. This could have been a lot worse.”
