As we mentioned yesterday, we’re on our annual vacation in Minnesota. Now, you might think that would mean that we get a reprieve from Enbridge and oil pipeline related matters. But no. They evidently dog and hound us at every turn, wherever we go. For example, when we got out of bed yesterday and checked the local newspaper, this is what greeted us:
Yep, it appears that Minnesota regulators are every bit as weak and reluctant to protect the public interest as those in Michigan. Sigh. We’ve got a lot more to say about this matter — and about the Minnesota decision as one small piece of a larger Enbridge puzzle– in a separate post.
But right now, rather than looking forward, we’re doing a bit more reflection on the year that has been here at the Line 6B blog. As we said earlier this week, it’s our birthday or anniversary, one full year since we started this thing. So we’re looking back (a little sentimentally even). This morning, we’re going to kick off a series of posts on some of our “greatest hits” (if you’ll forgive us a bit of self-indulgent back-patting), some of the posts we’ve written that, in our view, merit some re-visiting. The Minnesota story reminds us one of those hits in particular– but we’re going to save that one for later.
Instead, we’ll start this year in review where it has to start, where everything Enbridge-related absolutely must begin, with the crucial context without which one can’t understand anything about what Enbridge is doing in Michigan (and beyond), with the document that anybody who thinks they have an opinion about Enbridge, critical or supportive, has to have read if they want to have any sort of credibility whatsoever, if they want to be taken seriously: The National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the Marshall spill.
The release of this report in July of last year– and our reading of it– is what changed us from frustrated landowners to critics and activists. Its parade of horrors, its litany of poor decisions, neglect, and inaction, all attributable to a dreadfully lax safety culture at Enbridge, will send chills down your spine.
So early on in the life of this blog, we did a series of posts on “Tales and Lessons” from the report, in which we not only summarized some of the more horrifying findings from the federal investigation into the Marshall disaster. We also considered how those tales appear to reveal some general truths about Enbridge that explain how they have conducted themselves during the course of the Line 6B “replacement” project– conduct and behavior we have continued to write about. In fact, looking back at this series nearly a year later, it’s extraordinary how often we have returned to the three basic problems with Enbridge that we then, via the NTSB report, identified. Here is just one example:
In the first post in that series, we told you about Enbridge’s failure to abide by its own safety protocol, known as 10-minute rule– a failure that greatly exacerbated the severity of the spill into Talmadge Creek. In disucssing this failure, we asked the question “Does Enbridge learn from its mistakes?” You can imagine what sort of answer we arrived at back then. But what is perhaps most striking to us looking back on that question now is that it turns out to be a question that we are still asking. In fact, in a pair of posts just last month, we asked what amounts to the very same question: why can’t Enbridge do better?
The fact that we’re still asking whether Enbridge learns from its mistakes nearly 12 months on suggests to us that the answer is perfectly obvious.