Oil spills, floods, airlifts in Colorado
Efforts continued Friday to cope with fallout from flooding that's rocked the Rocky Mountain state -- including more airlifts of stranded residents, discoveries of oil spills and a plea to one town's residents to stay away until E. coli is cleared from their tap water, CNN reported.
The number of confirmed dead throughout Colorado from the flooding that began last week stood at seven Friday, just as it was a day earlier.
Another three people are presumed dead in Larimer County, which straddles the Wyoming border. Another 82 people there were still unaccounted for as of Friday afternoon, county sheriff's office spokesman John Schulz said.
Then there's the sizable toll flooding has had on buildings, roads and bridges, as well as the natural surroundings that in many ways define Colorado.
"We're about to embark on a rebuilding effort that is truly epic in scale," Gov. John Hickenlooper said Thursday.
This includes oil and gas that leaked in lakes, rivers, streams and more as the floods rolled in.
Colorado's Oil and Gas Association, the industry's trade association, said no fracking operations were underway when the floods hit -- meaning "no fracking fluids, no chemicals associated with fracking, nor equipment were on sites at the time of the flooding."
Yet as of Friday morning -- at which point about 70% of the impacted area still hadn't been assessed -- state authorities were tracking 11 locations with a sheen or other evidence of leaked oil and gas.
This is in addition to at least five sizable releases of oil, including two recently confirmed into the South Platte River near Evans, state Department of Natural Resources spokesman Todd Hartman said Friday.