As most readers of this blog know, today marks a terrible day. On July 25, 2010, Enbridge’s Line 6B ruptured, spilling over a million gallons of tar sands oil into Talmadge Creek, a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. The spill was not an “accident”; it was the result of neglect, mistakes, poor choices, negligence by Enbridge employees, and a “culture of deviance” from safety protocols at the company as a whole. There’s nothing to celebrate about this day. A better way to mark this occasion is to re-visit and re-read the NTSB report on that spill. It is a parade of horrors. Or, if that’s too much for you to take, you can get a taste of it by looking back at the three part series we did on that report a couple of years ago. There you’ll get the highlights (by which we mean the low lights, of course).
Or even better, head on over to the Pipeline Safety Trust’s “Smart Pig” blog, where they do a brilliant job putting the spill into the appropriate perspective. For our part, we’re on vacation and trying (not very successfully) to not think about such things for a while.