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Cleanup and debate rage on a year after Alberta ‘black liquid’ fouled U.S. wetlands
News Articles Featured | Vancouver Sun | July 25, 2011
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Durk Dunham was having lunch with the Calhoun County sheriff when his dispatcher called with the news: “We have an oil spill and we need you to respond immediately.”
At first, Dunham thought it might be something routine – maybe a tractor-trailer had flipped and dumped a couple hundred gallons of diesel fuel along a back road. How bad could it be?
The awful answer came on a helicopter ride later that evening as Dunham, the county’s director of emergency management, flew over the Kalamazoo River with executives from Calgary-based Enbridge Inc.
Below, a sprawling landscape of environmental ruin caused by one of the largest inland freshwater oil spills in American history.
“I saw black liquid flowing where the river used to be. It was just black. It wasn’t like a black, watery thing. It was pure black,” says Dunham.
“At that point, it was silent in the helicopter. I knew this was catastrophic. Frankly, I was teary-eyed for the whole trip.”
It was early on July 26, 2010 that Enbridge detected its Line 6B had ruptured near Talmadge Creek, a meandering stream just outside the city limits of this city of 7,000 in south Central Michigan.
The violent force from the 76-centimetre pipeline sent a gusher of Canadian crude down three kilometres of creek and into a section of the Kalamazoo teeming with turtles, muskrats, fish and Canada geese.
By the time the 41-year-old pipeline was shut down and the spill contained, more than 3.8 million litres of Alberta crude had been dumped into the Michigan wetlands, fouling a 65-km stretch of the Kalamazoo River.
KALAMAZOO STILL CLOSED
Now, one year later, local residents and U.S. authorities are taking stock of the toll. A National Transportation Safety Board investigation into what caused the two-metre gash in the pipeline is ongoing, with its conclusion perhaps months away.
The Kalamazoo, which in normal summers would be flush with paddlers and recreational fishermen, is still closed to the public as a massive effort to clean up the remaining oil – most of it now submerged on the riverbed – continues.
Also raging is the heated debate that the Enbridge spill ignited in the U.S. and Canada over the safety of pipelines – some new, others decades old – that carry oilsands bitumen to markets in America’s heartland.
“We are pumping this new, possibly more corrosive, material at higher temperature and pressure through an aging pipeline infrastructure, and we need to know if that is going to cause more problems,” says Stephen Hamilton, a professor of aquatic science at Michigan State University, and president of the Kalamazoo River Watershed Council.
“All those things could – we don’t know yet – but they could make these accidents more likely.”
If last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico raised U.S. public awareness about the risks of pumping oil from deep beneath the floor of the sea, the Enbridge spill was the catalyst for a wave of scrutiny over how crude is shipped to market from the oilfields of northern Alberta.
Most notably, the fight over two major North American oilsands pipeline projects – TransCanada Corp.‘s 2,700-km Keystone XL from Alberta to Texas and Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway line to Kitimat, B.C. – intensified after the Kalamazoo spill.
Within a month of the Kalamazoo spill, a U.S. House committee convened a hearing into pipeline safety issues raised by the Enbridge incident. Two more congressional panels have met on this issue since June, including one last week in response to the spill of about 95,000 litres of oil from an Exxon Mobil pipeline into the Yellowstone River in Montana.
550 WORKERS AT SITE
In Marshall, the larger debate over oilsands pipeline safety was, initially, lost in the frantic fight to save the river.
“Let there be no mistake – this spill was an absolute nightmare,” says Dunham.
To say the Enbridge spill has dramatically altered life for residents along this heavily used section of the Kalamazoo is an understatement.
Before the morning of July 26, when the smell of oil blanketed Marshall, many residents were not even aware 190,000 barrels per day of crude was coursing so close to the Kalamazoo.
Long a favourite spot for lazy kayak trips and small-boat excursions, the river today is lined with kilometres of containment boom and populated by noisy airboats filled with workers in safety gear.
Some 550 Enbridge contractors, under the direction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, are still deployed to the site of the spill.
On some boats, workers use high-pressure water “stingers” to stir goblets of oil from the sediment on the river bottom. Crews on other vessels follow, scooping the oil into garbage bags at natural deposition points along the polluted zone.
To date, an impressive 3.5 million litres of oil has been recovered.
Cheryl Vosberg, the environmental program coordinator for the city of Marshall, recalls standing at the lip of the Ceresco Dam, 10 km downstream from Talmadge Creek, watching black oil gushing over the spillway on the evening of July 26. She wondered at the time if the Kalamazoo would ever recover.
“That was a year ago and now, if you stand there and look, you can barely see residual signs that this spill happened,” she says. “The progress has been amazing and fairly quick, but there still is a long ways to go.”
A re-assessment of the spill area this spring found significant submerged oil at natural deposition points, in crooks and bends where the flow of the river slows.
EPA officials directing the clean up are hopeful some sections of the Kalamazoo can reopen by late August.
“When our invasiveness tips the balance towards being more destructive to the river than just leaving the oil in place – ecologically and environmentally – then that’s when we have to think about stopping. We’re are not at that point, but we are approaching it,” says Ralph Dollhopf, the EPA’s incident commander and federal on-scene coordinator in Marshall.
“We still have to pick up the largest, heaviest accumulation of submerged oil. There is enough submerged oil out there right now that when it gets disturbed, it brings up that (oily) sheen on the river.”
‘BANK TO BANK OIL’
As the cleanup begins to wind down, attention is being turned to lessons learned.
Dollhopf and Mark Durno, the deputy incident commander, describe the Enbridge spill as one of the most significant challenges of careers that have included deployment to disaster scenes ranging from Ground Zero in New York to New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina and Capitol Hill following the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Because the Kalamazoo River was at flood stage last July, the oil topped the river’s banks and coated large areas of vegetation on both sides of the Kalamazoo.
As the water began to recede, “one of my observations was the big bathtub ring of oil on the shoreline,” says Durno. “I saw bank to bank oil on the Kalamazoo. It was the largest single spill event I have observed in 18 years of this business.”
That the oil bursting from the pipeline was heavier oilsands crude added a new, more challenging element to the massive cleanup effort. It also added to wider controversy over diluted bitumen.
Oil producers and pipeline operators reject environmentalists’ claims that oilsands bitumen is more dangerous or difficult to transport than conventional crude.
“The fact is that independent analysis of oilsands-derived crude oils has conclusively demonstrated that these oils are not corrosive to steel,” Terry Cunha, a spokesman for TransCanada, said in a recent response to criticisms of his company’s Keystone XL project.
Dollhopf isn’t in the business of finding causes of the spill – his job is emergency response. From what he’s experienced, the presence of oilsands crude in Line 6B complicated the cleanup in Michigan.
“We are not tarsands oil experts. But we can tell you this particular oil has resulted in our needing to be creative in learning how to identify the submerged oil component,” Dollhopf says. “It has resulted in a longer and more expensive cleanup.”
RESPONSE PRAISED
In Marshall, residents who had never dealt with a major oil spill were initially skeptical about how Enbridge would respond to the crisis. One year in, several local officials with direct involvement in the cleanup give the company high marks.
“When we ask for something from Enbridge, we get it,” says Jim Rutherford, Calhoun County’s public health officer.
Adds Dunham: “From Day 1, it has been 100 per cent cooperation.”
Jason Manshum, a company spokesman based in Marshall, said Enbridge expects to spend $550 million on spill cleanup, excluding possible fines and lawsuits. All but $35 million to $45 million of that will be covered by insurance, he says.
The company has purchased more than 126 properties from landowners who lived within 60 metres of Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River, with another 19 homes moving to close this month.
TURTLES RELEASED
The effect on wildlife has been significant. Enbridge has cared for 3,200 animals, including 2,400 river turtles, affected by the spill, Manshum says.
This spring, 400 turtles that wintered at a wildlife rehabilitation facility were released back into the river, with a 97 per cent survival rate.
“We have made a mess in this area, and for residents and businesses in this area. We have been working extremely hard over the last year to clean up,” Manshum says.
Even as local officials praise Enbridge for how it has reacted, they fear another spill is inevitable and want an overhaul of U.S. pipeline safety regulation.
The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are planning to advance pipeline safety legislation as early as this fall.
ENBRIDGE SPILL: THE NUMBERS
AMOUNT SPILLED: 20,082 barrels spilled, 3.83 million litres.
AMOUNT THAT REACHED WATERWAYS: 8,033 barrels, or 1.53 million litres.
AMOUNT OF OIL RECOVERED: 18,245 barrels or 3.48 million litres.
Enbridge
Read more: http://www.canada.com/news/Cleanup+debate+rage+year+after+Alberta+black+liquid+fouled+wetlands/5155063/story.html#ixzz1TDzU5300
Tagged with: pipeline, enbridge, oil spill, michigan, kalamazoo
