OAKVILLE – The ministry of environment says it will use regulatory powers if it has to to get a gasoline spill in Bronte Creek cleaned up quickly.

A ministry spokesperson says the 300-metre long spill in the creek is being watched closely.

Gasoline began seeping March 11 from a pipeline owned by Trans-Northern Pipelines Inc. on property owned by Suncor March 11.

Trans-Northern has placed containment booms in the creek in the area north of Speers and Bronte roads and underneath the Rebecca Street bridge to absorb any additional gasoline seeping into the creek.

The discovery sparked an environmental clean-up effort on the part of the town, which was eventually turned over to Suncor.

Oakville’s public works director Dan says the petroleum product appeared to be oozing out of the east bank of the portion of Bronte Creek that flows through the Suncor property site, opposite the Petro Canada Refinery.

Trans-Northern Pipelines Inc. notified the Ministry of the Environment March 16 of a leak in one of its gasoline pipelines, which is buried only 350 metres north of where the Bronte Creek slick was seen.

The pipe, which carries a variety of petroleum products to the Suncor facility and is located two metres underground, was fixed and returned to service,. It was previously estimated 100 litres of gasoline were lost as a result of the leak.

The Ministry of the Environment is requiring Trans-Northern to clean up the site and outline the extent of the contamination, which now appears greater than originally believed.

Gary Robinson, Trans-Northern manager, said while the leak was found on March 16, it had probably been leaking since around March 11, the day the slick appeared in Bronte Creek.

This is perplexing for Robinson because it means the gasoline moved more than 300 metres in just a few days, if not hours.

“On clay soils it would take weeks or months for that to travel just a couple of dozen feet, ” he said.

Through the use of a ground penetrating radar, Robinson believes he has found an answer to this riddle in the form of an ancient river bed, which may have served as a pathway for the gasoline and allowed it to move so quickly.

With the extent of the contamination now known, the task becomes keeping it from spreading and cleaning it up.

“This site is not conducive to digging and dumping (the contaminated soil). You can’t just go down there and make it into an open pit mine, Bronte Creek is too valuable a resource to treat it that way, ” said Robinson.

“We are looking at bio-remediation, which means we can inoculate the subsurface and the ground water with a nutrient material that actually consumes hydrocarbon, but we have to be very careful that these things don’t start eating other things that are down there naturally. So that’s still being assessed.”

A chemical material that dissolves gasoline is also being considered by Environment Canada and the Ministry of the Environment, as an option to oxidize the fuel.