It’s been a few days since our last landowner story. But don’t worry; we’ve got more. We think the series has been quite powerful (if you’ve missed any part of it, please take a look back). We wonder what Enbridge thinks. We wonder how many stories like this, how many voices of unhappy landowners they need to hear before they’ll accept that they’re responsible for all the dissatisfaction, pain, and bad feelings. We wonder whether they’ve got the courage and integrity to own up to that.
Today’s story comes from Bob and Beth Duman. You likely know about Beth. She’s a real hero, one of the earliest landowners to speak out, organize, and help inform her fellow landowners about this project. We all owe her a debt of gratitude. And like some others we’ve heard from in this series (and that David Hasemyer wrote about last week in Inside Climate News), the Duman’s home is very close to the pipeline. We can hardly imagine what they’ve had to endure.
Construction work at the Duman’s house.
By Beth and Bob Duman, Oceola Township
An excellent one-word response to your request [for an account of our experience with Enbridge] would be:
Horrific.
Our lives have been turned upside-down for over a year. Dealing with Enbridge, especially with their “musical chairs” of right-of-way Agents, and their continual disrespect of our contract, our rights, and even our good will has created a huge amount of stress within our family and between us and our neighbors. The entire process took over a year, with the invading army driving on their log-mat road for nearly 9 months through our back yard, within 15 feet of our house, rattling our windows, knocking down pictures off our walls, upsetting our dogs, and generally disrupting our lives. All this, after being assured that they’d be “on our property” for 3 to 6 weeks.
Even though we had agreed to a contract with our specific needs detailed in the “line list”, Enbridge managed to come up looking like either fools or uncaring oafs, by ignoring some simple requests, like speeding through our yard, throwing up clouds of dust. Refueling one of the monster machines just outside our bedroom windows. Having to force them to allow a garden hose out to our garden to water it, and a bridge over their log-mat road for our lawn tractor for access to our wood supply. In almost every case we had to watch them, catch them breaking our agreed contract, and then they begrudgingly tried to satisfy us.
One bright spot in this huge folly has been the remediation work of Bowman Excavating, and Marshal Bowman’s point man, Brent Smith. They actually met with us and asked us how we would like the right-of -way restored. When we told them about the 25 years-worth of Prairie plantings that were destroyed, they offered to re-plant it with a selection of native prairie plants, and they put in a water irrigation system to water the plants in mid-July’s awful heat. They hauled in topsoil to replace the sand and gravel that Enbridge left instead of 10,000 years-worth of fertile soil. This has also been a source of many hours of work, as the freshly-reseeded grass came up along with thousands of ragweed and foxtail grass that came in with the new soil. We have spent the better part of 4 weeks pulling out these weeds so that they don’t re-seed themselves for next year.
So we will stick with our first word on the entire experience: Horrific. A monetary settlement 3 times what we were given could not replace the sense that we have been imprisoned in our own home for a year. And this nightmare isn’t over yet, as we are sure that they will be back to have us “sign off” on the work which will release them from any further responsibility for the massive ecological damage that they are causing not only on our 330 feet of the line, but everywhere that their pipelines have leaked or broken.
Sadly, we just read an article in the Livingston County Press & Argus about a landowner on the next segment of the 6B pipeline west of Stockbridge, [David Gallagher]. It could have been almost word-for-word about us, but it was Enbridge doing the same things all over again to a new set of landowners.
Horrific, really.