CALGARY -- The Saskatchewan government says the pipeline that leaked 200,000 litres of oil into a frozen pond in the southeast corner of the province is nearly 50 years old and there's no record of it ever being inspected by provincial authorities.
The spill on the Ocean Man First Nation was discovered and reported last Friday but initially neither the government nor suspected owner Tundra Energy Marketing Ltd. of Calgary said they knew for sure where the oil had come from.
An excavation Wednesday identified the two-kilometre pipe as belonging to Tundra.
On Thursday, the government said it had found a small hole on top of the four-inch-diameter pipe on a weld connecting two segments and it plans to remove the damaged portion for further analysis and metallurgic testing.
In its update, the government says that when it was built in 1968, pipelines shorter than 15 kilometres were exempt from licensing under provincial law but the pipeline was retroactively licensed in 2014.
It says records weren't kept of inspections of unlicensed pipelines. Inspections were required to be completed by the companies.
The government added no incidents involving the line have ever been recorded in the provincial database.
