Fuel spill at Atlanta airport sends 10,000 gallons into Flint River

Cleaning efforts are still underway after a fuel spill at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport dumped around 10,000 gallons of fuel into the airport storm water system and the Flint River.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that the fuel came from a fuel pit hydrant valve attached to a fuel system pipeline at the airport on Jan. 30.

Gordon Rogers, the executive director and riverkeeper for Flint Riverkeeper, said it’s unclear exactly when the fuel spill started, and it’s also unclear how the spills actually get to the river.

“But what is clear is that they shouldn’t be getting to the river. There should be some kind of secondary containment for all such accidents, and it’s quite clear that there is no containment because these spill volumes get to the river within a matter of hours,” he said.

The Flint River has been the victim of at least nine spills in the past decade and also sewage releases and de-icing releases from the airport, he said.

The riverkeeper has been working with the airport for more than a decade, and the issues they’ve raised should have been corrected by now, Rogers said. 

“Our friendly approach is over at this point. We’re examining all of the different remedies that are available to citizen groups like Flint Riverkeeper. We’ve sort of had a bellyful of it,” he said. “There’s all sorts of different types of pollution that the airport is responsible for, but they’re doing very little, from what we can tell, to control it other than just lip service.”

Rogers said they have sampled the water up to 65 miles downstream to get a better picture of the environmental costs of the pollution, but they have not received the results yet.

They have found evidence of pollution up to 10 miles downstream so far, and they are advising residents to speak with their water providers to determine if they need to take special precautions with their water supply.

In 2022, the airport was fined $40,000 for a fuel spill that discharged around 1,300 gallons of jet fuel into the river, impacting more than two miles of the river’s ecosystem.

Fuel spills and other pollution from the airport can have immediate impacts on the environment by killing wildlife, but the long term impacts from chronic pollution reduce populations that the ecosystem depends on, such as insects and crawfish.

“Pollution from the airport is chronic. It’s not fuel spills all the time, but it’s something all the time,” Rogers said.