From our friends at My Edmonds News:

The City of Edmonds reported Friday morning that an Allied Waste truck struck a pole in the Burlington Coat Factory parking lot at 24111 Highway 99 in Edmonds and spilled diesel fuel into the City’s storm water system on 242nd Avenue Southwest.

“If you see diesel fuel in the storm system or in the lake, this is the reason,” City Stormwater Engineering Program Manager Jerry Shuster said in an email to Lake Ballinger residents Friday.

City of Edmonds Public Works Director Phil Williams said that the department has “crews out placing absorbent materials (coiled booms and pads) into all of the downstream basins. We have done eight so far and have four more to do.

“This seems to be working well so far,” Williams said, adding that visual inspection of the lake earlier this morning “did not show any visible sheen on the lake itself, at least just yet.”

Monitoring of the lake will continue, and Allied Waste and Snohomish County Fire District 1 are working to get an estimate on the amount of product lost by measuring the remaining fuel left in the truck tanks, he said. “Their initial guess was 20 gallons or less,” Williams said. “It doesn’t take much to make a real mess.”