"HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — Shannon Miller Ward would like to know how someone loses enough gasoline to fill nearly two Olympic swimming pools without even missing it.
Last summer, a crack in the Colonial pipeline, the country's biggest fuel pipeline, leaked at least 1.2 million gallons of gasoline into a small nature preserve here on the edge of the Charlotte suburbs.
The pipeline leaked for days or weeks without anyone knowing, including Colonial Pipeline Co. officials, until a pair of teenagers riding four-wheelers found a puddle of gasoline. At first, the company estimated 63,000 gallons had leaked, but that's grown nearly twentyfold.
It's now one of the biggest gasoline spills to occur in the United States. According to Pipeline Safety Trust's analysis of federal data going back to 1968, it's the largest gasoline spill from a pipeline outside of a tank farm storage facility.
"The bigger it gets," Ward said, sitting on a deck chair outside her home here last month, "the more outlandish it seems that they didn't know.""
