ENOCHVILLE — Officials are unsure just how much fuel seeped into the ground after they detected a leak in a pipeline Wednesday on Freeze Road. Authorities say the 36-inch pipe could have been slowly leaking fuel for months, even years.

Friday night, work trucks filled the area surrounding the pipeline, owned by Colonial Pipeline Co. About 40 people have been working to fix the pipe since Wednesday, according to Steve Baker, spokesman for Colonial Pipeline.

Colonial Pipeline is an interstate common carrier of petroleum products. Each day, it delivers an average of 80 million gallons of gasoline, kerosene, home heating oils, diesel fuels and national defense fuels to shipper terminals in 12 states and the District of Columbia.

Officials were alerted of the spill Wednesday by neighbors who detected an odor. By 11:45 a.m. workers had the the pipeline shut off. By 5:30 p.m. they had found the leak, but did not have it under control until later that night.

After excavating the area, workers placed drums under the line, collecting about 1,400 gallons of fuel, according to Samar Bou-Ghazale, environmental engineer in the division for water quality for the N.C. Department of Environmental and Natural Resources.

Once under control, workers pumped between 30,000 and 40,000 gallons from the line into tractor trailers.

Baker said an investigation could take weeks to find out how much fuel spilled before it was noticed.

Wayne Ashworth, director of Emergency Services for Rowan County, said the leak came from two cracks in the line and was a very slow one. The leak could have been going on for months, possibly years, but didn’t spill enough fuel into the ground to create an odor that anyone noticed .

“None of us have any idea how long a period of time,” Ashworth said. “I don’t think we’ll ever know how long it’s been.”

To repair the pipe, workers had to put a steel sleave around it and then weld the sleave into place.

Once the spill was under control, the company’s first priority was public safety, Baker said. The company is working to test groundwater and nearby wells. As of Friday, they had detected one family’s well that had been contaminated.

The line is in the watershed for Lake Don T. Howell, the Cabarrus County reservoir that supplies water to Concord and, to a lesser extent, Kannapolis. But officials say there’s no danger of the contaminants getting into creeks that feed into the lake.

Bou-Ghazale said that although some groundwater has been effected, none of the fuel has reached surface water. “At this time there is no sign of diesel fuel reaching into the drainage area,” he said.

“As far as getting into the surface water, there is no danger of that,” agreed Ray Furr of the water and sewer authority for Cabarrus County.

The Environmental Protection Agency is also checking for surface water contamination.

“The company is doing a good job of trying to remedy the situation,” Bou-Ghazale said.

Colonial Pipeline has installed carbon filtration systems for the nearby households and has provided bottled water.

The company is also taking water samples from various places in the area and having them tested for contaminants. “We are committed to these folks,” Baker said.

The company will clean the soil eight feet into the ground, much more than is probably needed, Bou-Ghazale said, however “it’s better safe than sorry.”

Ashworth said the neighbor who noticed the spill called the EPA directly, while county and state officials were not notified until mid-morning Thursday.

“By the time we got down there, there was a massive clean-up operation going on,” Ashworth said. “We have a responsibility to our citizens and we can’t fulfill that responsibility unless we know what’s going on.”

He said both the company and EPA should have notified the county and the state. Colonial Pipeline, the EPA and county and state officials will sit down when the problem has been resolved and figure out the breakdown in communication.

“In this case I don’t think any real harm was done,” he said.

But he would like to make sure the same problem doesn’t happen in future incidents. “No one was harmed, but still the system didn’t work,” he said.

Colonial Pipeline hasn’t had a spill significant enough — 2,100 gallons — to have to report it since before the year 2000, Baker said.

Scott Jenkins contributed to this article.

Contact Jillian McCartney at 704-797-4253 or jmccartney@salisburypost.com .