Oh boy. This morning Eric Lawrence of the Detroit Free Press (as we’ve said many times, one of our favorite reporters who has done excellent work on Enbridge matters for months) has a new piece explaining that Enbridge does not want to pay for more studies assessing damage from the Marshall spill. Here’s a taste:
The pipeline company responsible for the 2010 tar sands oil spill that fouled almost 40 miles of the Kalamazoo River is refusing to pay $800,000 to complete two new studies to assess the spill’s damage.
Trustees of the National Resource Damage Assessment, an effort to assess the damage caused by oil spills and other hazards, wants Enbridge to participate in the studies, which involve vegetation and recreational use in the area affected by the spill.
The group comprises state and federal agencies, such as the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as two tribal governments.
But Enbridge notified trustees in June and October that it was “declining to cooperate” because adequate data had already been collected.
Here we have yet another example of something we have discussed repeatedly over the past eight months: Enbridge’s unwillingness to take full and complete responsibility for the Marshall spill. Instead, they only pretend to take responsibility. Mostly, they want to pretend that the Marshall debacle is over and done with; they want desperately just to move on. We’ve covered numerous examples of this:
- with regard to their Northern Gateway project in Canada;
- with the EPA’s recent order stating that the Kalamazoo River isn’t cleaned up yet.
We have also dealt with this matter in our discussions about and with Enbridge executives. For example:
- in our long (dare we say, important) post about former Enbridge CEO Patrick Daniel;
- at length in one of our posts in our series on our conversations with V.P. Mark Sitek;
- and in our response to the stunning remarks of Liquid Pipelines Division President Stephen Wuori to a Livingston County newspaper.
The point in all of those cases (and others) has always been the same: Enbridge seems not to understand what it means to truly take responsibility. They seem to think that somehow they get to decide when things have been made right. But truly taking responsibility means leaving that determination up to those whom you have wronged, or those in a position to decide when the situation you created has been rectified, when the mess you have made has been cleaned up.
What’s even worse is that in the face of that disaster and Enbridge’s refusal to fully take responsibility for it, the good people of the state of Michigan have STILL allowed Enbridge to build a new pipe that will increase the capacity of oil they can transport and thereby increase their profits– by millions and millions of dollars.