No, probably not.

Jeri (azpaints) said:

The leak originated from a Shell Oil storage tank and had nothing to do with the government other than some of the damaged land was government owned

so it was similar to the Exxon Valdez

Except on land

That's what they have pipeline patrol planes for, that fly out of here every day.

they have specific spectrum infrared cameras aboard that are tuned to see the normally invisible plumes of hydrocarbons and the wavelengths that oil and other flammable liquids absorb.

So normal terrain looks bright in these wavelengths but a plume of gas looks almost black, as does that given off by evaporating petroleum and petroleum distillates.

The planes are of course also equipped with gps units, and all the infrared imagery is precisely geotagged. they have a computer in the plane that captures all the imagery but also has a huge database of oil lease ownership and related land information and contact addresses and numbers.

so a machine compares imagery from day over day and week over week of the region, and when the camera picks up a small (or large) spill, the computer looks up whose oil well, tank battery, flow line, pipe line, etc. is at the GPS coordinates.and sends that to a server on the ground somewhere - maybe by a satellite link - where then someone's phone gets a text - or a list of people get a text all automatically without human intervention.

They have at least 21 aircraft that I have detected, all of them ubiquitous Cessna 172s. I suspect it's because the C172 is cheaper to acquire and operate than the faster 182, and generally they fly those routes at only about 1000 feet off the ground in a grid search pattern about a half mile or so between passes that are typically about 12 to 15 miles per leg.

UThe airplane has a good payload and performance profile for this kind of work, and they are relatively easy to fly, fast enough to cover a reasonable amount of terrain, but also fuel efficient enough to stay up for 6 to 7 hours at a time and still slow enough that if something is detected, the pilot can easily maneuver back over the spot and make a couple of extra close-up passes to get more angles of the spill to better pinpoint where the leak is on an oil well site.

I meant the Shell leak was on land and the Valdez was in the ocean.

Jeri (azpaints) said:

I meant the Shell leak was on land and the Valdez was in the ocean.

It was.