Someone recently asked, “How much of Erie’s soil has been and will be hauled away?” The short answer is 8,722 cubic yards of contaminated soils have been excavated from Erie since the ECMC started making this data available in 2014. This is equivalent to 632 dump truck loads, each carrying 14 cubic yards. Of these 18 spills, 16 reported an “unknown” volume of oil spilled, and 13 reported an “unkown” volume of condensate spilled.
Here’s the breakout for each year:
| Year | Number of Spills | Total Soil Excavated (Cubic Yards) |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | – | – |
| 2015 | 1 | 1,200 |
| 2016 | 1 | 60 |
| 2017 | 3 | 4,413 |
| 2018 | – | – |
| 2019 | – | – |
| 2020 | 3 | 1,975 |
| 2021 | – | – |
| 2022 | 3 | 685 |
| 2023 | 5 | 350 |
| 2024 | 2 | 39 |
When we expand our search to the entire State of Colorado, there are 2,292 spills that required soil excavation, with an average of 165 cubic yards excavated for a total of
687,513 cubic yards excavated. The distribution of these data is shown in the chart below:
Interested in where these spills occur? See them visualized on the Weld County Oil Spills Map.