Today, we return to our series on tales and lessons from the NTSB report on the Marshall spill (read Part 1 and Part 2). Those of you who have been with us for a while know that we’ve been reading it so you don’t have to. But we encourage everyone to read it. Frankly, we think it should be required reading, if not for all Michigan citizens, then at least for every public official in the state–and we know from conversations with them that more than a few of our elected officials have not read it. In fact, the report should probably be required reading for all Michigan schoolchildren. Perhaps we’ll start writing to the MDE…

Anyway, we’re thinking more today about the requirements listed in the Brandon Township resolution. Several of these items involve technical improvements in the pipeline, enhancements drawn from Enbridge’s statements about the standards they’ll use for their Canadian Northern Gateway project. These enhancements are undoubtedly a very good thing and we once again applaud the Brandon trustees for asking for similar standards here in the U.S. That being said, however, what the NTSB report teaches us is that when it comes to Enbridge, technology isn’t really the problem; humans are. Which leads us to the topic of this part of our series:

Part 3: Technology is not enough   

When it comes to reassuring us that we shouldn’t worry about the Line 6B replacement, Enbridge likes to talk about the amount of money they’ll be investing and the state-of-the art technology they’ll be employing. Here, for example, is the sort of thing Enbridge spokesman Joe Martucci says frequently:

Enbridge has instituted a number of enhancements in pipeline design, construction and ongoing maintenance and operations and plans to build a state-of-the-art project, using the most advanced technology, safety measures and procedures in the industry today.

Again, that’s all well and good. We hope it’s true. But even if it is, it doesn’t address the most important Enbridge failures the NTSB report identifies. In fact, aside from the condition of the pipeline itself, all of the technical and technological safeguards worked pretty well with regard to the Marshall incident: in-line inspection tools found what they were supposed to find, pipeline pressure readings were accurate, alarms went off when they were supposed to go off, valves shut down properly– and so on.

So, for the most part, the story of Marshall is not a story of technological failure. Instead, it’s a story of human failure. Or, more precisely, the story of the failure of a corporate culture that, as the report states, routinely “accepted not adhering to… procedures.”

The report details numerous examples of this. We’ll just give one quick one: despite numerous warning signs that there was serious trouble in Marshall, Enbridge control center staff ignored those warning signs and kept pumping oil through a ruptured line for hours and hours. Despite numerous technical indications of a rupture, they figured that since no one from Marshall had called to tell them that oil was gushing out of the pipe, then oil must not be gushing out of the pipe– even though they hadn’t bothered to call anyone in Marshall to find out. From the report:

. . . there was no evidence that any member of [Enbridge’s] control center staff sought to obtain information from anyone in the Marshall vicinity to verify the presence of a leak. Rather than actively soliciting information from sources in the Marshall area, the control center staff continued their erroneous decision-making by misinterpreting the absence of notifications from the Marshall community as actual information that there was no leak.

So here’s what we know: the disaster in Marshall was compounded exponentially not by technological problems, but by problems that get to the heart of the way Enbridge conducts its operations every day. All the technology in the world isn’t enough to overcome what the NTSB report calls Enbridge’s “tolerance for procedural deviance.” Thicker walls and state-of-the art equipment can’t compensate for what the NTSB report describes as “a systemic deficiency in the company’s approach to safety.”