Crews in the western Canadian province of Alberta are working Friday to contain an oil spill that dumped into a river Thursday night, about 100 kilometers southwest of Red Deer.

The pipeline spill was discovered around 7 p.m. local time when up to 3,000 barrels of crude oil dumped into Jackson Creek, a tributary of the Red Deer River.

Pipeline operator Plains Midstream Canada is currently working to contain the hydrocarbons in Glennifer Lake, a pristine wilderness recreation area that also serves as a reservoir for Red Deer, a city of 91,877 in west-central Alberta between Calgary and Edmonton.

The company said its network of area pipelines was turned off when a spill of light sour crude was discovered. The rupture occurred in its Rangeland south pipeline, just north of the town of Sundre.

"Approximately 10 kilometers of an affected segment of the Rangeland south pipeline system has been shut in and booms are being deployed at Gleniffer Reservoir to contain the release," Plains Midstream Canada said on its website. "Emergency response specialists and equipment including specialized boats, skimmers, and response trailers are now on site."

The company said it is working with various regulatory agencies to monitor the water and air quality situation and drinking water has been brought in for local resort operators in the remote area as a contingency measure.

"Light sour crude oil has a strong petroleum odor,"the company said in a news release, "but this odor does not pose a health or safety risk to the public."

City officials in Red Deer have been told booms are being set up on the river near a dam and the reservoir and there was no risk to the city's drinking water supply. "We've been told they are working at containing the spill at this time, and then it's contained in the Glennifer reservoir," Leslie Chiver of the Red Deer communication and strategic planning department told Xinhua, adding local residents were being given regular updates on the situation.

"The Glennifer reservoir is part of the Red Deer River water system and we do get our water from the Red Deer River,"Bill Johnston, director of disaster services for Sundre, told Xinhua, adding that the spill happened half a kilometer downstream from the central town of 2,610 people.

"There's no effect to the town of Sundre from the oil spill. It was all shut in last night," he said, adding Jackson Creek experienced "high stream flows two days ago," but had receded some since then.

The incident came just over a year after the oil-rich province experienced one of its largest spills in history on April 29, 2011, when a cracked pipeline in the northeast Peace River dumped 4.5 million liters.

Such disasters and the current proposals for new and expanded pipelines to pump oil to the United States and markets in Asia have drawn the ire of environmentalists, aboriginal groups and average Canadians.

The Houston-based Enbridge Inc. is proposing to build a 5.5- billion-Canadian-dollar twin pipeline bringing oil and natural gas from Alberta to a marine terminal in Kitimat in northern British Columbia.

Kinder Morgan, a Texas pipeline operator, is spending 5 billion Canadian dollars to nearly triple its crude oil capacity from Alberta's tar sands to 850,000 barrels a day.

The oil will be pumped to a terminal in Burnaby, B.C. requiring supertankers to traverse Vancouver's pristine harbor for its collection. The move is drawing increasing opposition in the Canadian city.

Ben West, a climate and toxins campaigner with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, told Xinhua that the current Alberta spill is just "another reminder that shipping oil is a real dangerous business."

"It's a real wake-up call for us all, it should be. We should be, as we're considering these pipelines, we should be looking at these oil spills and that should help remind us that these things are real dirty and dangerous and it really isn't just a good direction for us to be going in," he said.

"We really need to think about our land use and transportation planning. Primarily the oil from tar sands is for transportation fuel more than it is for electricity. So we need to be thinking about investment in rail and public transit in the way that we build our cities, so we're less dependent on fuel. That's ultimately what we need to do if we are going to reduce our demand for this kind of stuff," he said.