Boy, were they quiet about it! Consider that I’m a news
junkie, that I’m from Wisconsin, and that I care I-suppose-you-could-say
passionately about environmental issues. So why didn’t I know about line 61,
about which the company that operates it says
this:
As part of our ongoing efforts to meet North America’s
needs for reliable and secure transportation of petroleum energy supplies,
Enbridge is expanding the average annual capacity of Line 61 from 560,000
barrels per day (bpd) to 1.2 million bpd.
And
where is that expansion? Check it out:
OK—Enbridge wants to transport over a million barrels of tar
sand oil through Wisconsin every day: Is that a problem?
Regular crude oil is plenty toxic, but the tar sand oils are
an environmental disaster at every level.
Let’s start with the sand that you need to fracture the oil
wells: That sand has to be very fine, and Wisconsin has the fortune or
misfortune to have the largest source of the rock that produces the sand in the
nation. So there was a boom in production of the sand in the last decade or so,
a boom four which the state’s environmental protection agency was completely unprepared.
Hmmm…or was it? According to my lights, it had been very carefully
prepared indeed, and from many angles, and it was prepared to do absolutely
nothing. Why? Well, consider this quote
from the Scientific American, tellingly and heart-breakingly
titled “How
Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin’s Environmental Legacy.”
Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of
science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of
controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees. And he
has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental
protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on
wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks.
Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus
pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and
proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at
the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
So now we have an
explosion of sand mines, and that sand is extremely fine, making it easy for it to
become airborne, and also causing silicosis, which can lead to lung cancer. And
according to one source, 79 percent of air samples in frac sand sites exceed
the levels of silicone established by OSHA. Right—the miners wear masks, but
what do you do about little Billy, five years old and living downwind from a
mine?
So the sand is
bad enough, but the fracturing? Well, first of all, it requires a huge amount
of water, and then produces a correspondingly huge amount of very contaminated sludge, about which nobody knows what to do, so people have been digging
ponds, most of which are leaking. And as you can see in the video below,
wildlife is severely affected, both by drinking it and by—in the case of
birds—being coated in it.
And so what gets
produced? Well, it's tar sand oil, the bulk of which is drilled in Alberta,
Canada, and it's particularly nasty stuff: It can lead to things as minor as a
headache to diseases as lethal as leukemia. So from a public health point of
view, wouldn’t it be logical not to expose as many people as possible to the
oil? Of course, but what have we done? Chosen to ship—either by rail or by
pipeline—the stuff all the way across the country.
Which is precisely
what Enbridge, the largest distributer of natural gas in Canada, and the
operator of—in their words—“the longest crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons
transportation system in the world” does.
How long is that system? Well,
it goes from Superior, Wisconsin, to a refinery near Chicago, but that’s only
the system in the USA (on different lines of the system, the pipelines cover
1900 miles); in Canada, the figure falls to a little over 1400 miles. So that’s
3300 miles of pipeline for both countries; that’s not bad if you’re piping
water, it’s potentially disastrous if you’re piping oil.
And in fact, it
was either very nearly disastrous or absolutely disastrous, depending on your
point of view, when the pipeline broke on 25 July 2010
near Marshall, Michigan, and began flowing into a creek that fed into the
Kalamazoo river that would later flow into Lake Michigan.
Back up five
years—that’s when, according to an investigation by the National
Traffic and Safety Board, Enbridge first knew that they had problems on
that part of the line, but chose not to, or at least didn’t, act. Why would
they do that? According to one critic-turned-whistleblower, John Bolenbaugh, it
was financially a better deal to let a spill happen, and then have the
insurance company pick up the tab, than it was to do routine maintenance. (As
an aside, the tar sand oil is apparently especially toxic and corrosive on
pipes.)
Nor was that all:
Enbridge decided that the alarms were false, due to a bubble in the pipeline, so the solution?
Instead of shutting down, they increased the pressure on the line, so
that when finally, after 17 hours, they realized they had a leak, 81 percent of
the amount spilled occurred in those 17 hours.
That was because the boys in the monitoring
station were in Edmonton, Canada, and not smelling what the boys fishing down
by the river were smelling, which was very strong indeed. Oh, and they were
also getting headaches….
How bad was it?
The worst inland spill in the country, nor was that all, because it
turns out that tar sand oil reacts differently in water than crude oil. Crude
oil stays on the surface and is relatively easy to collect: We were in uncharted seas with tar sand oil. So we had to learn that tar sand oil initially
stays on the surface, releases hydrocarbons such as benzene, and then sinks to
the sea or river floor, and what to do with that?
Ah, for the days
of American ingenuity! Because I would love to have read, as I now will love to
write, “Enbridge’s expert team of haz-mat professions instantly realized and
conceived a special vacuuming process (since patented) that scoured each
millimeter of the river bed, collected any trace of oil or other chemicals,
transferred it to custom-made tanks, which were then taken to a disaster
response center, which had rockets ready in order to shoot the hazardous
material into space, to incinerate the material as well as the rocket itself
outside of the fragile tissue of our precious atmosphere. At Enbridge, we
care!”
No, that wasn’t
the sentence (run-on intended, all the better to obfuscate and lull you into
passivity) that got written. Instead,
Enbridge pretty much told the EPA what they were going to do, which is why I
could view in one video the fascinating spectacle of the side of the boat, the
oil-drenched river, and the hand reaching down to clean up this toxic mess
with…
…a paper towel!
Guys? That’s
something I’d do!
Well, they got
more clever as time went on. According to whistle-blower Bolenbaugh, they
scooped up whatever was visible, took it to a field, dumped in out, pulled
layers of burlap or canvas or whatever, put a topping of soil on that, and then
seeded it. Viola! Instant meadow—just don’t dig to deep.
Or stir the
riverbed too much, since, as the videos make clear, you’ll get a plume of oily
who-knows-what floating down the river. So they poured in rocks, then sand,
and…
This was too much
for even the EPA, which ordered further dredging. It
was all bad enough for the director of the
NTSB, Deborah Hersman, to say that Enbridge officials acted, “like the
Keystone cops.”
Unless, of
course, you were the whistle-blower, who got the ax the very morning after he
blew the whistle, and then started getting death threats. All of which were
freaking him out enough to start putting videos of his motorcycle with two
screws missing on the front tire, and his neighbor opining that those screws
were designed never to come out.
Full
disclosure—yes, he looks nuts. But remember that old adage that even paranoiacs
have enemies? It’s all on his website: you judge.
Nor was the
public unaffected, and Bolenbaugh got all of that on camera, too, and
pretty compelling it is, especially if you have never seen a person having a seizure.
I have, and if the video’s is an act, I hope it wins the Oscar.
Nor was it the
case that you had to be sick to get Enbridge’s attention, you had to be sick in
the right location, which meant that unless you had the river passing through
your living room—right, I know I should edit that out, but watch the videos,
and you’ll get steamed, too—well, you were probably a malingerer or hoping for
a handout.
Apparently, it
was all so bad that Enbridge had to buy 134 houses. The catch? Well, they got
them at fire sale prices, cleaned up their mess (maybe) and then sold at a
higher price. So says—of course—the whistleblower.
The videos are
wrenching in part because of the constant complaint, which I find utterly true,
that “they don’t care”—with the “they” being Enbridge. To which I would reply
that of course they don’t care, and perhaps they shouldn’t. Why? Because
corporations don’t care until it’s too expensive not to care, which is why we have
regulatory bodies like the EPA and the NTSB that have enough teeth to gnash the
corporation into shreds and fed it to their cubs, and then loll in the sun,
looking at the bones and the carnage. Then—trust me—the corporations will care.
So it was a disaster,
a disaster of over one million US gallons of extremely toxic muck spilled that
got into the creek and then into the river, and almost—though who knows, maybe
it did—got into Lake Michigan. Which is connected, you do remember from 5th
grade geography, to all of the other Great Lakes, and which are scenic, yes,
but also provide a lot of water for however-many-millions to drink.
One final irony:
Everybody is reporting seriously that they “closed” the river, which I found
curious, because I have seen rivers, including the mighty Mississippi,
and it was very much my impression that a river flowed, so had someone found
the faucet handle that could turn off a river? If so, not doing so was criminal
negligence when we had all that flooding five or ten years ago. But no, closing
a river simply meant that humans could not swim or boat or even go near it. But
what about fish and wildlife? You know the answer.
A long piece, I
know. But Enbridge, this Enbridge, this fair country—sorry, company—is the very
company that wants to “upgrade” the pipeline so that one million barrels will
pass through…. OK—I think I did the math, which was to figure out that a barrel
contains 31.5 US gallons, multiply that by 1,000,000 (barrels per day), divide
by 24 (hours per day) and then get the figure of 1,312, 500 (gallons per hour).
And that means? That we could have a spill as bad as Michigan’s in under an
hour. A spill in Wisconsin, my home state.
Remember
Wisconsin?
Stay tuned!
