Last week, we brought you the latest in our series of “Landowner Stories,” this one from our friend Patricia Maurice over in Cass County. Enbridge has been working furiously over there, often late into the night and making all sorts of terrible racket. In the process, they’ve been distressing landowners like Patricia who have little to no idea of what’s been going on and why they have been working all night. This is part of the pattern of poor communication that we’ve been talking about here on the blog for more than a year. Why Enbridge can’t understand that the vast bulk of landowner anxiety, distress, and worry– not to mention bad feelings toward Enbridge– could be eliminated simply by keeping people honestly informed, we have never been able to fathom (though we have worked hard at fathoming).
For a long time, the bizarre dynamic that has followed from Enbridge’s failure simply to keep people informed is that people wind up contacting us, at which point we try to contact Enbridge, even though Enbridge long ago appears to have adopted a policy of not communicating with us about most matters (with the exception of things that happen on our property, causing a frenzy of emails and phone calls on our part to everyone we can think of…). The end result is that nothing really gets answered, everybody winds up even more frustrated, and we have no choice but type up long blog posts about how awful Enbridge is at communicating with landowners.
Lately, however, this seems to have changed a little. Specifically, Enbridge spokesperson Jason Manshum seems to have been given the green light to actually respond to us (we noted this last month). And he has continued to do so. (We have no idea what prompted this remarkable change.) This is a genuinely positive step forward and we think that Manshum would agree that our correspondence has been pretty painless and perfectly amicable; we’re polite and everything!– though we are also persistent and don’t accept non-answers. The crazy thing is that this is almost all we have ever asked for: honest, open, prompt, forthright communication. That alone could solve so very many of Enbridge’s problems with landowners. (Again, why they haven’t just taken our word for that and corrected the problem is beyond anyone’s comprehension). As we said to Jason just today: if this keeps up, we might just run out of things to blog about…
All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that Manshum explained the Cass County situation to us. They have been doing various tests on the pipe over there, hydrotesting in particular. The thing about hydrotesting a pipeline is that once you start, you can’t stop until the test is completed (which takes some time). And when other inline inspection tools (like smart pigs) run through a line, the line has to be constantly monitored until those tools are removed. So that means– particularly on these short winter days– that the tests might well need to run through the night. We ran this explanation through some of our knowledgeable expert friends and it is indeed true (it’s in the actual federal regulations). We’re grateful to Jason Manshum for explaining the situation to us.
Of course, this doesn’t explain everything that has had Patricia concerned. And it certainly doesn’t change the fact that not having explained this or anything else to residents of the area like Patricia Maurice caused those residents all sorts of sleepless nights and all kinds of (possibly) needless worry and turmoil. That remains inexcusable.