Update, August 20, 2013: Well, it turns out that what looked like a very big Enbridge whopper (details below) is actually just a run-of-the-mill bit of Enbridge misinformation. Reporter Tina Casagrand has the clarification from Enbridge in a comment to this post. We are glad for spokesperson Katie Lange’s sake that she wasn’t actually saying that the Marshall spill was the result of “something that was stuck in the pipe.” Unfortunately, the clarification doesn’t actually bring all that much clarity to the matter. Here’s why:

Enbridge now says that “the incident” to which Lange’s refers in her statement is the discharge that resulted from a hydrotest of the new Line 6B earlier this summer. (You might remember that we wrote about it at the time.) We’ll take them at their word on this. The problem, however, is that the statement is STILL inaccurate and even, it seems, rather disingenuous. The inaccurate part is that the incident did not take place in Marshall. Ore Creek is in Tyrone Township, Livingston County, nowhere near Marshall. The disingenuous part is that Lange says Enbridge didn’t “purposefully” violate the permit, suggesting instead that the violations were the result of something getting stuck. However, if you look at the violations-– there are ELEVEN of them– it’s hard to see how any of them could have been the result of something getting stuck in the line. For instance, (just to name a few) the DEQ cites Enbridge for not having any on-site representatives during the discharge, for not taking any samples of the discharge on June 17 (three days before the discharge), for not conducting water inspections as required the week before the discharge, and for not inspecting their equipment as required. As far as we can tell, none of these things have anything at all to do with something getting stuck in the pipe. So the question that remains is whether Enbridge failed to perform these required actions “purposefully,” as Lange claims. Maybe that’s a difficult thing to determine, we guess. But if the violations aren’t the result of an accident (and the evidence suggests they weren’t), and they were not purposeful, that only leaves one alternative: incompetence. That is not very comforting.

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Two very interesting stories appeared in newspapers today written by talented young reporters. Over at the St. Louis Beacon, Tina Casagrand has an excellent piece about Enbridge’s Flanagan South project. As we’ve noted before, this is another one of Enbridge’s clever schemes to out-Keystone Keystone XL. This line will head south through the midwest and eventually make it all the way to the coast. And the most disturbing part? Even though it crosses an international border, Enbridge has once again found a way to skirt the presidential permitting problem and avoid public scrutiny. And also once again, the project is mostly flying under the radar while almost all eyes remain fixed on KXL. This is one reason Tina’s piece (and others that have appeared before it) is so very important.

But the most extraordinary thing of all in the article– and, honestly, we thought we’d heard it all by now– is what Enbridge spokesperson Katie Lange has to say about the Marshall spill. If you’re not sitting down, you might want to. At least be sure you’re holding on to something solid. This whopper is even worse than the infuriatingly dishonest story Enbridge VP of Operations Richard Adams told to the EPA a couple of weeks ago. Okay. Are you ready? Here’s Lange on Marshall:

“For the incident in Marshall, it wasn’t that Enbridge purposefully violated, it was something that was stuck in the pipe,” added Lange.

Something stuck in the pipe?! We have long been baffled and angered by the misleading, disingenuous, obfuscatory, and inaccurate things that Enbridge spokespersons– the Larry Springers and Jennifer Smiths and Jason Manshums say. But this one has to take the cake. One can only wonder where in the world poor Katie Lange got that patently false piece of information. Surely she or someone at Enbridge will call Tina to correct it. Right?

The other interesting story today is from Ursula Zerilli over at MLive, who is following up on her article from last week. For some strange reason, Enbridge decided to get chummy with some reporters as they kick off phase two of the project and so (evidently) reporters got to ride around in a van with Tom Hodge and some others. But unlike last week’s article, in this one Ursula speaks with some Enbridge critics, among them our friend Dave Gallagher, whose situation as an affected landowner is a real nightmare– just get a load of the picture that accompanies the article! The article also features some remarks from inspector Raymond Ashley, who appears to have a real penchant for forced, mawkish metaphors:

“We are trying to weld more than just this pipe together,” said Raymond Ashley, who was proudly wearing a photo of his granddaughter as a badge. “We’re welding more than just a pipeline. We need to bond together the environment, safety and the integrity of this pipeline. We have one day to build integrity and that’s today.”

Anyway, while we think the article is accurate and fair (she even emphasizes Enbridge’s slow response to Marshall), it also left us a little dissatisfied for reasons that might be worth explaining in a bit of detail. The reason we’re dissatisfied– and we don’t really blame Ursula for this– is that the article lacks nuance. It lacks subtlety and complexity. Again, this isn’t really Ursula’s fault. We live in a (news) culture that likes simple binary narratives– us vs. them, black vs. white, good guys vs. bad guys. That’s what (or so editors seem to think) appeals to people. Making this even worse is that Ursula was probably only given about 800 words in which to tell her story– hard to be nuanced in such a short space. Yet nuance is important. Here’s why:

One comes away from the article with a simple dichotomy: there are pipeline proponents (like Tom Hodge and Enbridge) and there are pipeline opponents (the protestors from MICATS). They are the article’s protagonists and antagonists (we’ll let you decide who’s who!). But the problem with this narrative– which pits people who don’t want pipelines against people building pipelines– is that it is precisely the way that Enbridge wants to have this story framed. It’s why former Enbridge CEO likes to talk about “revolutionaries” and why Enbridge spokesman Larry Springer talks about “special interest groups.” That kind of story serves Enbridge’s interests perfectly because it allows them to sound reasonable and pragmatic, while casting everyone else as a little bit crazy, on the fringes, out of the mainstream. So, for instance, Tom Hodge gets to say things like this:

“It’s hard to understand their logic,” he said of those protesting the pipeline replacement project. “It seems like they want us to turn the pipeline off or just not replace this pipeline, which already ruptured. There’s not a good alternative to what we are doing and we feel like it’s a good thing for the State of Michigan.”

And this:

“There would be riots in the streets if food wasn’t being delivered or if fuel wasn’t being delivered,” he said. “I’m all for having an alternate fuel, but until that becomes available, there’s no other option. You can use natural gas but that has to come by pipeline, too. If that ruptures, it’s not a polluting event like oil … It’s a fireball.”

See how that works? Hodge makes it sound like the alternatives are clear and stark: EITHER Enbridge gets to build whatever pipelines it wants to build however it wants to build them OR there will be riots in the streets because people are starving. I mean, what kind of person would be in favor of people starving?!

But here’s the thing: that is complete and total and utter nonsense. It is a ridiculously false choice. Those are quite plainly NOT the only alternatives. People are not going to starve and riot in the street if Enbridge does not get to pump 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day across Michigan through a shiny new Line 6B. No serious person believes any such thing. And yet Hodge gets to imply as much and, in doing so, also gets to come off as the person who is being rational and realistic.

And that’s not even the worst part. The other reason this simplistic (and largely false) narrative of people in favor of the pipeline vs. people opposed to the pipeline serves Enbridge so well is because it allows them to evade the real substance of most of the real criticism of the way they have conducted themselves in Michigan over the past three years (or more). As we have said over and over and over and over again (so often we don’t even have the energy to provide links anymore), the problem isn’t that they’re replacing Line 6B. The problem is how they’ve gone about it. Most of us do not oppose the “replacement” of the line– a new pipe is obviously better than an aging pipe. That has NEVER been the issue. What we object to is the way that Enbridge has cleverly skirted federal regulations, the way they have abused their easement rights and mistreated landowners and trampled property rights, the way they have misinformed people, the way they have flouted or ignored local authority and thrown their weight around, the way they have essentially re-written Michigan law to serve their own financial interests. All that plus the fact that we have a bunch of elected officials and a set of pathetically weak regulatory systems that allows all of this to continue.

Those are the real issues. And they are issues that affect and therefore ought to concern all the citizens of the state of Michigan. To pretend otherwise– to pretend that it’s a simple matter of energy production vs. a handful of environmental radicals– does nothing but allow Enbridge to avoid having to face any of the things I’ve described, to avoid ever being confronted with genuinely tough questions. So once again, as always, Enbridge gets exactly what it wants.