The Enbridge spill into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River has been contained, but it’s left a nasty sheen on the company’s reputation and its sprawling network of aging pipelines in North America.
This week’s spill of about 20,000 barrels of oil came after a “warning letter” from a United States government official in January that said Enbridge wasn’t doing enough to mitigate corrosion on the pipeline that burst Monday, and had likely violated federal regulations.
In Battle Creek, home to 53,000 people, residents feared the damage had already been done, despite increased effort to contain and clean up the oil. Some had to leave their homes as the noxious smell polluted the air and oil lapped the river’s shore.
“We’ve already been devastated in Battle Creek,” said vice-mayor Chris Simmons. “The oil’s here and it’s had a tremendous impact on our river, the environment and the community.”
Out by the river, a sign from the local county public health department warned that swimming, boating and fishing were prohibited because of the spill.
Several families who were evacuated from homes along the shoreline have been put up at a hotel in downtown Battle Creek. Displaced people continued to trickle in on Thursday night, staff at the McCamly Plaza Hotel said, but they were being turned away because the hotel was full.
Renee Carpentier and her family wearily packed their belongings back into their white minivan at the McCamly Plaza Hotel in Battle Creek Thursday night. They were evacuated from their home on the river shore in Marshall earlier this week, and then forced to move again to another hotel that had room for them.
"We're exhausted," Ms. Carpentier said as her husband lifted a room fan onto the backseat.
Resident Steven Schwartz stood on a bridge, clapping his hands to scare birds away from the water. “I'll be here all night,” he said tearfully.
Enbridge’s spill is far smaller than the millions of barrels that poured into the Gulf of Mexico after a disastrous blowout on a BP oil rig, but financial analyst Bob Hastings of investment bank Canaccord Genuity said the incident has “badly tarnished” the Calgary company’s reputation.
The spill is the latest in a series of similar missteps over the past decade for Enbridge, North America’s largest oil pipeline operator with more than 13,000 kilometres in the ground. The pipelines can carry 2.6-million barrels a day – mainly along an Alberta-Chicago route – and much of them are decades old, like the 41-year-old line that burst in Michigan.
The Polaris Institute of Ottawa tallied about 600 Enbridge leaks in the decade to 2008, at an average of roughly 200 barrels. The last largest spill comparable to the one in Michigan happened at a hub near Edmonton in 2001, where most of the oil was eventually recovered.
The Michigan spill also pokes a hole in arguments put forward by Canada’s oil sands industry in recent months – that its production methods, including delivery via pipelines, are environmentally safer than offshore drilling.
Responding on Thursday to questions of safety in the U.S. regulator’s warning letter, Enbridge insisted it has been in close contact with government officials throughout the year and had dug up ground in 139 locations to investigate potential problems on Line 6B, the pipeline that failed.
The spill location, in a marshy area at an Enbridge pump station southeast of Battle Creek, was not flagged by earlier tests as a place for worry, the company said. Enbridge had started this year implementing new technology to monitor corrosion.
Pat Daniel, chief executive officer of Enbridge, apologized to Michigan residents for “the mess we have made.”
