Last week my next-door neighbor counted 10 surveyors in orange vests out in the open space where my husband and I walk our dog in Silver Creek. They were working for HF Sinclair, a Dallas-based oil company that wants to run a new fuel pipeline through our neighborhood on its way to Salt Lake City. Most of us had no idea. I only knew because another neighbor forwarded me the route maps HF Sinclair gave the Salt Lake City Council. Nobody gave them to us. The project is called Westline Connect. The short version: HF Sinclair’s Pioneer Pipeline already carries gas, diesel and jet fuel from Wyoming to North Salt Lake, and they want to bump it from about 60,000 to 95,000 barrels per day, with more phases after that. The draft maps show the new line crossing under the Weber River or Silver Creek, cutting through Silver Creek Estates and Glenwild, then following I-80 toward Parleys. The company says the route isn’t final. They’d start digging in 2028. That fuel isn’t for us. HF Sinclair told its own investors the point is to fix supply shortfalls in Nevada and California. Utah already exports more of these fuels than it uses, and the state’s own energy office projects our demand falling over the next twenty years even as we grow. This is a pass-through line. HF Sinclair gets the revenue. Summit County gets the trench. What the maps don’t show is what’s underneath: the aquifer that feeds the private wells and the little water districts thousands of us in the basin drink from every day. Pipelines beat trucks on safety, and the company says it will follow every rule on the books. But good intentions don’t stop leaks. In 2010, a Chevron line above Red Butte Garden leaked crude into the creek for about ten hours before anyone noticed. From 2010 to 2024 the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration counted 9,329 fossil fuel pipeline leaking incidents, an average of at least 1.7 events per day. Even that official statistic is a vast underestimation, Texas alone reports an average of nearly 30 pipeline leaks per day. In 2010, a Chevron line above Red Butte Garden leaked crude into the creek for about ten hours before anyone noticed. It was the fire department that eventually alerted Chevron to their leak. Six months later, another leak, same pipeline, same area. In 2013, another Chevron line dumped roughly 500 barrels of diesel into the wetlands at Willard Bay. A federal review found that pipeline operators’ own monitoring caught only about a quarter of leaks. The slow ones are what reach groundwater, and the slow ones are what the sensors miss. HF Sinclair’s own track record is worth a look. In 2024, a subsidiary paid $7.4 million in Clean Water Act penalties for a crude spill in Oklahoma. In December 2025, federal regulators said the same subsidiary skipped required valve inspections for two years on its existing crude line between Arepi and Kimball Junction.  Salt Lake City got a staff report and consultant maps, and its staff have already told the council the route hits the city’s main drinking-water protection zone. What did Summit County get?  Surveyors in our open space, and letters from Westline Connect’s lawyers showing up in mailboxes. One homeowner who said no to a survey was told the company had already let the sheriff know it planned to come in anyway. Here’s the part that should bother everyone in the county, well or no well. A new state law, HB 575, handed pipeline permitting to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality and put it on a 120-day clock. Our own county planning director has said the county can’t veto a route. So the calls that matter will get made in Salt Lake, on a deadline, by people who will never fill a glass from the Silver Creek aquifer. We just came off the worst snow year on record. Resorts opened late and closed early, skier days fell by a quarter, and Summit County took the biggest room-tax hit in the state. Businesses here that make most of their money in winter ate it. Now we’re the county being asked to carry the risk of a pipeline that locks in 30 more years of the fuel that’s shortening our winters.  There’s also an obvious question nobody has answered. The Pioneer line already runs from Echo Junction down Weber Canyon to North Salt Lake. Why not just upgrade that pipe to the size they need? It would be the same distance, roughly the same steel, with no new corridor through anyone’s neighborhood. The company’s FAQ says the Weber Canyon route is too close to the river, which is a strange thing to say about a plan that puts new pipe alongside and under the Weber River out here. The simplest explanation is money: upgrading the existing line means shutting it down for a few months, and a new parallel line means no lost revenue. That’s a reasonable business call for HF Sinclair. It’s a lousy deal for the people who’d live on top of the result. Which means the next few months are the window. Here’s what we must demand: HF Sinclair: Show us a Summit County route map and a groundwater study, like you did for Salt Lake City, before you lock anything in. And show your math on why upgrading the Weber Canyon line isn’t the better option for Utah. County Council: Hold a public meeting out here in the basin, and tell us straight whether the pipeline setback and spill-notification rules you passed in 2014 and 2015 still mean anything. Department of Environmental Quality: Commit now to a real comment period in Summit County when the application lands, not a notice buried on a state website. And neighbors: If you’re on a well or a small water district along the corridor, get your water tested this year. If something goes wrong later, you will want proof of what clean looked like. None of this kills the pipeline. It just means that if HF Sinclair builds it, they do it after answering to the people living on top of it. Right now the surveyors are here and the answers aren’t. Caroline Gleich is a Silver Creek resident. She serves as a volunteer trustee on the Summit County Service Area #3 board; the views here are her own and do not represent the board. The post There’s an oil company surveying our neighborhood. Who said yes? appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less