People and pets are being asked to stay away from the largest park in Washington, D.C., after a local power company spilled thousands of gallons of mineral oil in the area.
Pepco, the main power provider in D.C., discovered the leak last week after finding oil in Rock Creek, which runs through Rock Creek Park, and is now working to contain the spill, The Washington Post reports.
A spokesman for Pepco told the Post the source of the leak had been found and closed off, but that it would take weeks to repair the infrastructure and do environmental clean up.
“There will be some necessary work on the infrastructure itself to make some permanent repairs, but the biggest part of the project is remediation—making sure that any soil that had this non-toxic mineral oil on it is cleared out,” Sean Kelly told the paper.
The mineral oil in question, according to Pepco, is a non-toxic substance that was never a threat to anyone or to the environment.
The company said about 4,000 gallons of the oil leaked into Rock Creek Park’s soil, water and some underground power equipment, Fox 5 reports.
In 2011, Pepco was fined $1 million by the Maryland Public Service Commission for failing to fix problems with its power lines that led to frequent outages for D.C. area residents.
Most of the problems stemmed from Pepco’s refusal to trim trees encroaching on its power lines in a timely fashion. The company should have been trimming back trees every two years, but was actually doing it every four years.
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