Watershed Protection Council Awards Working to Monitor Kinder Morgan Spill
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On Thursday, not so far away from where things all began, a group of local government, educational and environmental groups met for the awarding of three grants to help monitor water quality affected by runoff from the 2014 Kinder Morgan Plantation leak.
The following organizations were selected for funding as part of the $1.5 million settlement to help monitor the extent of the damage from the spill:
Clemson Extension Service - Building Spatial and Educational Infrastructure that Engages and Protects the Source Water Watersheds of Lake Hartwell and Lake Russell - $23,904.00
Anderson County Soil and Water Conservation District - Water Quality Education & Monitoring in Anderson County - $52,295.00
Clemson University - Community education and citizen science in the oil spill impacted Broadway Creek Watershed - $49,957.00
Upstate Forever - Phase 3: Three & Twenty Creek Watershed Best Management Practice Implementation Project - $50,000.00
Anderson County Councilwoman Cindy Wilson, who was pivotal in obtaining the settlement money after the spill, said she hopes these projects, ones to be funded, and continued public efforts will restore clean water to the lakes, streams and rivers in Anderson County.
How it happened
On a cold December day in 2014, the trouble in Belton announced itself the way these things often do: not with alarms or headlines, but with smells and stains. Residents along Lewis Drive noticed dead patches of vegetation, a sickly sweet, metallic odor they could not quite place, and, in low spots, the oily shimmer of something that did not belong there. Beneath their feet, an old wound on a buried steel artery—the Kinder Morgan–owned Plantation Pipeline—had reopened, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline were quietly migrating through the red Anderson County soil toward the creeks that ultimately feed the Savannah River.
The Plantation line is one of those pieces of infrastructure that the modern South takes for granted, a 26‑inch conduit carrying fuel between refineries and markets, passing beneath pastures, churchyards, and subdivisions with the same mute indifference. Somewhere near Belton, an aging repair patch failed, and by the time the company understood the scale of the problem, as much as 400,000 gallons of petroleum products had escaped into the subsurface, forming a hidden lens of gasoline, up to fourteen feet thick in places, floating atop the groundwater. The spill, one of the largest of its kind in South Carolina, occurred not in some remote industrial corridor, but roughly a thousand feet from Brown’s Creek, a modest waterway whose tea‑colored flow winds through woods and fields before joining the broader Savannah system.
Tonya Bonitaibus of the Savannah River Keepers said on Thursday she remembered stepping out of her vehicle when visiting the site not long after the spill an was overwhelmed by the odor.
“The minute that I got out of the truck on that site and opened the door, I can still feel the smell that hit me,” said Bonitaibus. “I mean, I was just like What is going on? And the craziest, and the reason that I have this picture is if you look, there's a house that's sitting right there. I looked in that house. There's a car in the driveway. And in fact, there's a car in the driveway behind this picture right here. And that blew my mind because I couldn't breathe. There was so much smell. I walked up to the front door, I knocked on the door, and this lady answered. And she was standing there, and she had a multitude of small kids standing around her legs. And I said, ‘What are you doing here? Why are you here? Do you know what's going on?’ She said, ‘Of course I know what's going on.’ And I said, ‘Why are you here?’ and she said: ‘Because Kinder Morgan won't settle with us.’ And I said, all right, well now we got to fight.”
What followed was less an accident than a long negotiation—with chemistry, with bureaucracy, and with the patience of a community. As the company worked to repair the pipe and to define the extent of the damage, environmental advocates accused it of looking in all the wrong places: collecting groundwater samples from the “clean” side of the creek, where contamination would be diluted, and delaying the more uncomfortable work of testing nearer to the source. When, nearly two years after the rupture, monitors finally bored into the soils closest to the leak, they found contamination levels more than two hundred times higher than earlier readings, suggesting that the subterranean plume had been both larger and more stubborn than initial reports implied.
The chemistry of spilled gasoline is both familiar and insidious. Compounds like benzene and MTBE, names that rarely surface outside environmental impact statements, began to appear in monitoring wells, in seeps, and in the small tributaries that lace the woods near Lewis Drive. On paper, the threat was abstract—numbers in micrograms per liter, regulatory thresholds, contour maps of invisible plumes. On the ground, it was more tangible: aerators churning creek water to release volatile compounds; warning signs; and, for some, a gnawing awareness that the clear stream cutting through their property now carried a history it had not asked for.
As often happens when an industrial mishap intersects with a watershed, Belton became the stage for a legal and philosophical argument about what it means to pollute a river. Upstate Forever and Savannah Riverkeeper, two conservation groups with a keen sense of the region’s hydrology, sued under the Clean Water Act, arguing that, even though the pipe had been patched, gasoline was still traveling from the contaminated groundwater into Brown’s Creek and its connected surface waters, turning the spill into an ongoing violation. A federal judge disagreed, concluding that, because the original discharge had ceased and the pollutants entered groundwater rather than flowing directly from a pipe into a stream, the statute did not apply in the way advocates claimed.
That decision, though rooted in the specifics of a Belton pasture, rippled outward into the national conversation about the reach of environmental law. If a river is fed by a thousand unseen veins of groundwater, how direct must a company’s hand be to count as a polluter? The case from Anderson County joined a growing body of litigation testing whether contamination that migrates through underground aquifers before surfacing can be regulated like a pipe that discharges straight into a river.
Locally, the defeat in court did not mean surrender. As part of a Clean Water Act settlement, Kinder Morgan agreed to create a $1.5 million fund, dedicated to restoring and protecting the watersheds touched by the spill, a substantial sum in a county where conservation work often runs on volunteer hours and small grants. The money, directed toward projects in the Savannah River basin, was both reparative and symbolic—a tacit acknowledgment that what had seeped into Brown’s Creek could not simply be vacuumed back out.
Meanwhile, the less visible work continued. Under the supervision of the state’s environmental agency—now the Department of Environmental Services—the Lewis Drive Remediation Site, as it is antiseptically known in state files, acquired a patient’s chart of its own: well logs, groundwater gauging reports, contour maps of petroleum “free product,” and a schedule of periodic sampling that extended, at minimum, into 2025. In the language of regulators, the site was to be monitored and managed; in the language of residents, it was to be cleaned up.
In Anderson County Council meetings, the impatience was plain. Local officials, echoing the advocacy groups, passed resolutions urging Kinder Morgan to do more, and to do it faster, pointing to lingering contamination in tributaries of Brown’s Creek as evidence that the company’s preferred strategy—natural attenuation, aided by select engineering interventions—was not enough. When the state opened a public comment period on Kinder Morgan’s corrective action plan, more than a hundred comments came in, and, according to environmental lawyers who reviewed them, virtually none endorsed the company’s approach.
To stand at the site today is to encounter a landscape that looks, at a glance, ordinary. The hay fields are green again; the creek runs clear enough to mirror the trees along its banks; the pipeline lies, as it always has, invisibly below. Yet beneath that restored surface is a complicated geography of responsibility: thousands of gallons of gasoline that likely remain trapped in soil and groundwater; a monitoring regime that measures, quarter by quarter, the slow decline in contaminant levels; and a community that must live with the knowledge that its water once served as the test case in an argument about how far the law’s protection really extends.
“When we began to work with the spill issue over here in this area It was astonishing that a major company, New York Stock Exchange Company, did so little to maintain their properties,” said Wilson. “And so many people have been affected by the contaminants. Our Anderson County Council approved our county attorney writing the Amicus brief. that accompanied mister Frank Holloman with the Southern Environmental Law Center to the Fourth District in Richmond. And that's where the settlement eventually came was mister Frank Holloman and our county participation. We have been overwhelmed with torrid growth. Our council has now put into place, with the help of Mr. John Batson and the Planning Department and many people here, the riparian buffer requirement. And we're now dealing with the land use Development standards that are going to help prevent the horrors of what we endured so far. The most shocking thing that I learned is there's hardly a stream in our entire county unimpaired.”
