The Environmental Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of: Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill By David Correia
Additional monitoring wells found a plume of jet fuel slithering northeast from the original spill location and well beyond the northern boundary of the base. Kirtland estimated the plume at between one and two million gallons, but NMED raised that estimate to eight million gallons. Two years later, with more monitoring and evidence of the true scale of the spill, NMED revised the estimate dramatically to 24 million gallons, an amount 240 times larger than the 2000 estimate.
For comparison’s sake, the KAFB spill is larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which dumped more than 12 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound …
Unlike the crude oil in the Exxon Valdez disaster, jet fuel and aviation gas contain a variety of toxic chemical compounds, including benzene, toluene and various aliphatic hydrocarbons, and these are all found in the plume—in varying concentrations—at every depth. …
And in the 60 years since it first spilled jet fuel into Albuquerque’s aquifer, KAFB has yet to remove and treat a single gallon of contaminated groundwater.