There’s extra hassle with the Colonial Pipeline: The nation’s largest gasoline pipeline reported a spill in Tennessee in early July, including onto greater than a yr of public issues with the corporate, from a catastrophic hacking to being liable for the most important gasoline spill in many years.

According to the corporate, a valve failure spilled greater than 24,000 gallons of gasoline in Loudon, Tennessee; the spill was found July 4 by employees responding to studies of a fuel scent. That stretch of pipeline was shut down and the valve repaired, however on July 11 Colonial stated that gasoline had been found outdoors of the corporate’s property line. The firm said it’s nonetheless within the “investigative stage” of determining the extent of the spill and is monitoring air and waterways for air pollution.

If the title “Colonial Pipeline” sounds acquainted, that’s as a result of Colonial made a lot of headlines final yr. In May, the corporate was the sufferer of a cyberattack from ransomware group DarkSide that pressured it to close the pipeline down. (Both the corporate and the pipeline, which was inbuilt 1963, are named “Colonial.”) Colonial is the largest gasoline pipeline within the U.S., stretching from Texas to New Jersey, and pumps 2.5 million barrels of fuel per day; shutting off the pipeline that provides 45% of the East Coast’s gasoline for a number of days prompted, to place it mildly, a little bit of a ruckus. Despite the corporate’s whopping profits, it was going low-cost on its cybersecurity: A tech audit carried out three years earlier than the hack discovered that “an eighth-grader” may have damaged into Colonial’s system. Colonial ended up paying the hackers a ransom (with combined outcomes) to get the pipeline again on-line.

While that will look like sufficient hassle for one firm to seek out itself in for a yr, Colonial was additionally coping with different—arguably way more severe—issues. In November, the state of North Carolina sued Colonial over the largest gasoline leak within the U.S. in many years, which was found in August 2020 outdoors the town of Huntersville. In its lawsuit, the state claimed that Colonial mainly saved North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality in the dead of night in regards to the scale of the accident and didn’t present correct updates on the injury or cleanup. To date, Colonial has cleaned up greater than 1.4 million gallons of gasoline from the Huntersville website.

The current accident in Tennessee, volume-wise, is nowhere near the thousands and thousands of gallons spilled in North Carolina. But it’s price remembering that Colonial initially reported that the spill in Huntersville was simply 63,000 gallons, step by step inching up its estimates over months whereas protecting its cleanup operations comparatively hush-hush. Huntersville officers told local outlets in August 2021, a yr after the spill’s discovery, that they hadn’t had an replace on the cleanup in “months.” In November—15 months after the spill was initially found—the Department of Environmental Quality said in its grievance that Colonial nonetheless hadn’t supplied it with an replace of how a lot fuel was left to scrub, regardless of at that time already recovering greater than 1.2 million gallons.

Late final month, Colonial and North Carolina each agreed to a consent order, which went into impact final week, that mandates the corporate pay nearly $5 million for its position and take particular remedial actions, together with monitoring water and bedrock. (That $5 million looks as if chump change, contemplating that Koch Industries, the pipeline’s largest shareholder, made $85 million in dividends from the pipeline in 2016 alone.) The firm has additionally created a website on the Tennessee spill that it says it is going to be updating.

The Colonial CEO stated final yr that he’d favor nobody is aware of a factor about his firm and that the pipeline simply be left in anonymity to generate earnings for its shareholders. But with the massive variety of fuckups the corporate has had just lately, it may be a good suggestion for residents of Tennessee to familiarize themselves with Colonial—simply in case the leak will get worse.