I suppose it's possible that Transcanada requested the no-fly zone so they could have safe access to inspect the pipeline route by air without contending with a dozen other aircraft in the area. I used to do some pipeline flight inspections myself. It's usually one person in the cockpit (the pilot) who must fly the plane and inspect the pipeline route from a low altitude. Too many planes flying low, out of radar contact, in the same area could be dangerous. Not sure if that's the case, but it's a possibility.
It might have been to prevent bad press, too. I'd hope not.
16,800 gallons (400 barrels) sounds like a lot of oil, but it would only be about half what a railroad tanker car would carry. That's not a lot considering it's a 590,000 barrel-per-day pipeline, nor considering what a trainload of oil tank cars could spill in a derailment.
I read that there were no shallow aquifers where the spill occurred. If not, that oil isn't going anywhere. When I was a kid some jerk dumped a semi-truck full of oil into our neighbors cornfield by dumping it in his roadside ditch. If he'd have dumped it on the other side of the road it would have been in OUR cornfield.
I can't recall the lasting damage nor the amount of land that was affected, but it wasn't major -- maybe 5 to 10 rows of corn a couple hundred feet long. (This would have been in the late '50s when I was just a lad.) It was next to a creek less than a mile upstream from the lake that supplied water to the town... and fish for ME!
No oil went beyond the cornfield.
It sounds like this is under control. Could have been worse.
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