Nation : Oil Spills Near Exxon Terminal
About 27,000 gallons of heating oil poured into a busy waterway near Exxon Corp.’s Bayonne terminal this morning as it was being loaded onto a barge with a hole in it, the Coast Guard said.
The No. 6 heating oil was discovered leaking about 4:20 a.m. into the Kill Van Kull, a major route for barge and tanker traffic that separates Bayonne from Staten Island, N.Y.
Lt. Jeff Crawley, a Coast Guard spokesman, said the oil poured through a 12-by-6-inch hole and forced the closing of the busy waterway. Crawley said he didn’t know what caused the hole in the barge.
The Coast Guard said the heating oil was an Exxon product, but Louis Jung, a spokesman for Exxon’s Bayway Refinery in Linden, said he did not know who owned the oil.
The barge owner, Ekolof Marine of Staten Island, N.Y., had two environmental cleanup companies at the scene this morning, laying containment booms.
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