Preparing For The Worst | Video

Jenny Castro | 6/6/2012

A lot of people still remember the images from the BP Deep water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On Wednesday, near Towner, Enbridge Energy simulated a breech in their system. The goal was to prevent any kind of environmental damage from happening to the Souris River.

The Souris River served as a staging area for a disaster drill. An emergency response team responded on both land and in the water. Traffic control sites, command and control stations, decontamination areas and boats deploying booms and even dog food were all part of today`s exercise.

"We drop some dog food upstream from the river and we actually watch that travel down," said Katie Haarsager.

According to Haarsager, the dog cubes are used to simulate oil on the water. A series of booms were deployed by boats to capture the material floating down the river.

"We put the first boom in and then we put a second behind it and then a third one so that if any oil goes beneath the first boom it`ll hopefully get caught by the second or third one and it goes into a collection area where it has a skimmer and it picks the oil up."

When Enbridge runs a training drill like this, nothing is left to chance.

"According to our control point maps with low current, there will be four hours for the oil to get to this point and this is good access, so this is control point one."

Enbridge`s calculations were accurate and the spill debris hit the booms and steered into skimmers and then pumped into a holding tank.

"Our main concern is to protect the people from here to the leak site as quick as possible and the environment of course we wan to minimize that impact and once we secure that we can go onto other things."

Enbridge will now assess and evaluate this training exercise and make changes and improvements if needed.

Enbridge runs three emergency response drills a year and every employee is required to attend at least one of the exercises.

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