Gleniffer Lake to reopen in time for long weekend

Gleniffer Lake will reopen to the public on Thursday, as the cleanup of an oil spill wraps up, said Alberta Environment.

Provincial government officials told the public to stay off the popular recreational lake, about 130 kilometres north of Calgary, after as many as 200 barrels of sweet crude oil leaked out of a pipeline that lost pressure near Sundre on June 15.

The cleanup covered about nine kilometres of shoreline and picked up six tonnes of trees and branches that came down the Red Deer River into the lake, said Alberta Environment spokeswoman Cara Van Marck Tuesday.

"That was where the majority of the impact from the hydrocarbons was, was on this debris. There's also a little bit of a sheen on the surface of the water and that was also picked up," she told CBC News.

Alberta Environment is waiting for results of water quality tests before liftinga drinking-water ban.

Cleanup efforts by Pembina Pipelines, which owns the pipeline, are now focusing on the Red Deer River.

"Right now, we're concentrating on some spots in the river where [we] went down and found there's some oil remaining in small pockets, so we're going from pocket to pocket and cleaning up the river at this point," said Sandy Buchan, a district superintendent for Pembina.

He said he hopes that cleanup is finished by the end of this week.