Do you get déjà vu?

Among the very first assignments I gave myself when I started this blog more than ten years ago was to read and draw some lessons from the comprehensive report released in July 2012 by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) after its investigation into the causes of the 2010 Enbridge oil spill in Marshall, Michigan. (You can read the three-part series here.) At the time, the report made a lot of headlines, not least because of the scathing comments of then-NTSB chairwoman Debbie Hersman, who likened Enbridge’s handling of the spill to the “Keystone Kops.”

Last month, almost exactly ten years after the Marshall report, the NTSB issued another one: the results of their investigation into the horrific 2019 Enbridge gas pipeline explosion in Danville, Ky. The rupture of the 30-inch Line 15 pipeline killed one person, injured 6 others, and caused property damage and the evacuation of people from nearby homes.

The new report is very important, not least because of matters here in Michigan, where Enbridge is trying to convince the Public Service Commission that they can be trusted to build a billion dollar tunnel to house a new Line 5), but also because of matters in Wisconsin, where the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians is trying, with only partial success, to stop Enbridge from trespassing on tribal land, and matters in Minnesota, where the effects of Enbridge’s recklessness while constructing Line 3 are still not entirely known.

But the report is also important because of what it makes stunningly, if unsurprisingly, clear about Enbridge: that they have hardly changed at all since the last NTSB report. In what follows, I’ll provide some details about the new report, which I’ve read carefully in full. But if you just want the the tl;dr version, it basically amounts to this: “oops, we did it again.”

What makes this especially appalling is the fact that Enbridge has essentially been on a decades long campaign to convince us all that the Marshall spill was a come-to-Jesus moment for the company, that following that calamity, they came to see the light, underwent an almost religious conversion emblematized by the creepy iconography they expect their employees to wear as a reminder of their sinful past.

Their public displays of repentance began almost immediately after the 2012 report, as I pointed out at the time. They’ve continued ever since. Here, for example, is Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy two years ago in a report occasioned by the ten-year anniversary of the Marshall spill:

The result of the spill in Marshall is a company with increased awareness of safety and focused attention on proactive measures to maintain safe operation. Enbridge transformed itself to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future.

But the new NTSB report reveals these pious displays as a hollow sham, a kind of corporate televenagelism designed to dupe the credulous. It’s a lot like the link on the Enbridge website about “What’s Changed Since Marshall”: a road to nowhere.

All of which is to say that for anyone familiar with the report on the Marshall spill, the Kentucky findings will be disturbingly familiar. In both cases, Enbridge knew about defects in their pipeline years earlier but failed to take mitigating action. Also in both cases, Enbridge had in place procedures and protocols in place to help them respond in a timely way to a rupture, but they failed to follow those procedures. It’s the same old situation.

As a result, the new report at times seems practically to be copy-and-pasted from the 2012 one.  In the older report, NTSB takes Enbridge to task for “deficiencies” in its integrity management program (the company’s procedures and practices for ensuring the safety and integrity of the pipeline), describing the “inadequacy” of Enbridge’s program to “accurately assess and remediate” known defects in Line 6B. The new report finds that a contributing factor to the Kentucky rupture was, that’s right, “Enbridge’s integrity management program, which did not accurately assess the integrity of” Line 15.

More specifically, the new report shows, Enbridge failed to “estimate the risk from interacting threats” just as, in 2010, they failed to account “for uncertainties associated with the data, tool, or interactions between cracks and corrosion.” In both cases, Enbridge generated interpretations of data gained from its in-line inspections that permitted them to keep operating pipelines with known problems. “After the Marshall accident,” the 2012 report says, “Enbridge’s inspection contractors reexamined [previous] in-line inspection data and determined that the features were misclassified.” Similarly, in the new report the NTSB determines that “insufficient data were available to support Enbridge’s classification of the threat” of defects in Line 15 as low. In other words, Enbridge “underestimated the risks” of the defects in Line 15 before 2019, just as a decade earlier they “chose a less-than-conservative approach” to the risks posed by the known defects in Line 6B.

Equally troubling, if not more so, are the operational failures outlined by the two reports. As I mentioned above, the 2012 report describes in ugly detail Enbridge’s “tolerance for procedural deviance,” Enbridge’s disregard for its own safety protocols and procedures. “Inadequate training of control center personnel,” the 2012 report found, “allowed the rupture to remain undetected for 17 hours and through two startups of the pipeline.

The new report details a similar pattern. For example, just a few months before the terrible Kentucky explosion, one of its local operators—the same operator on duty the day of the rupture– didn’t know what actions to take in the event of a shut-down emergency. And yet, the report reveals, Enbridge took no steps to teach or retrain the employee. Thus, the NTSB concludes, “had Enbridge Inc. disqualified, requalified, or provided remedial training to the Danville compressor station operator after he displayed a fundamental lack of knowledge during the May 8, 2019, emergency shutdown, the operator’s closure of [a valve] during the August 1, 2019, rupture may not have been delayed, potentially reducing the volume of gas released.”

So way back in that series of posts from 2012, I asked: does Enbridge learn from its mistakes? At that time, I was skeptical but willing to give them a chance. But now, after ten full years spent exhaustively detailing example after example of the same mistakes, misrepresentations, and shenanigans, and after reading yet another scathing NTSB report, I know the answer all too well.

The far more urgent questions now are whether the judges in the pending Line 5 cases know it, whether the Army Corps of Engineers knows it, whether the Michigan Public Service Commissioners know it. And if they do, how are they going to act on that knowledge?