Early last week, we kicked off our latest series— on our experience with IJNR Kalamazoo River Institute— by ruminating on the strange current state of Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. Yes, both are lovely and seemingly very clean. Objectively speaking, it’s hard to say that Enbridge did not clean them up well (you can do a lot with a billion dollars)– although there’s much more to be done (so says the EPA). Of course, in our view, the cleanup effort is not really cause for any great celebration or any reason to go heaping praise on Enbridge. After all, if you break something that doesn’t belong to you, you should be obligated to fix it– and not congratulated for doing so.
But as we said in that previous post, what was most striking to us about the creek and the river was, first, the way in which the history of the spill appears to have been erased. The truth about what happened there in 2010 is evident only through a series of barely perceptible signs, all but unreadable to the average visitor. This, in our view, is a travesty. If there’s a sign commemorating the site where the Jeffery family once lived, there also ought to be a sign explaining why they don’t live there anymore. There ought to be signs and plaques up and down the river telling future generations of river-goers exactly what happened to the ecosystem and to the lives of all those decent, ordinary people– the Deb Millers and Susan Connollys. The future citizens of Michigan ought to know about the mess. They ought to know the truth– that people’s lives were disrupted, in some cases ruined, that their health was affected, that flora and fauna were destroyed– not just the clean up, and the greenwashing.
The other thing that struck us about the current state of the river and the creek– and it’s related to the first– is their “hyperreal” quality. The pre-2010 river and creek are gone and a new river and a new creek have taken their place, rivers and creeks re-made and, to a large extent, operated by Enbridge. Public, natural resource have become (to a degree) semi-private, artificial creations. And we just find that a little, um, creepy.
So why are we rehashing this today, having just written about it a few days ago? Well, because no sooner had we posted about this than we stumbled upon a perfect illustration of our point. Let us introduce you to David Jephson:
Jephson is the deputy fire chief in Terrace, British Columbia up in Canada– which is one of the (many) places where Enbridge has run into a bit of opposition with their massive Northern Gateway project (sort of Canada’s Keystone XL). Earlier this month, Enbridge invited a number of B.C. officials to a tour of Marshall and the Kalamazoo River so that the officials could observe first-hand just how marvelous and squeaky-clean it is now. This, evidently, is Enbridge’s way of persuading Canadian officials of the company’s all-around wonderfulness and putting to rest any apprehensions the officials might have about a Marshall-like spill in northern B.C.
Well, deputy chief Jephson was mighty impressed, as he told the CBC in a radio interview (he has also spoken to a local newspaper). For one thing, Jephson seems to think it’s meaningful– evidence that it was no big deal?– that some random people the delegation met in Detroit didn’t know very much about the spill. But the most extraordinary thing Jephson says is “you wouldn’t know there was a spill there unless you were told”– as if the erasure of the history of that spill and the devastation it caused were a good thing, as if the view and experience, and history of the river and the spill they were getting from Enbridge were accurate, transparent, and honest– rather than carefully orchestrated. The level of gullibility on display by Jephson is truly extraordinary. In fact, Enbridge is so pleased with the things Jephson has been saying since the tour that they have posted a transcript of the radio interview on their website and appear to have adopted him as their new mascot– they’ve replaced poor Michael Milan!
But of course, few people really know what the tour Enbridge took Jephson on was really like, even though Jephson says it was a “fact finding trip”– and nobody other than Jephson appears to be talking We have no idea who the officials on the tour met and spoke with– and we’ve been trying to find out. As is typically the case with Enbridge, the tour, the information supplied by the tour, and information about the tour, all seem to have been very carefully controlled, even a little secretive. But you can be sure that the people on the tour certainly didn’t speak with any Enbridge critics. Nor do they appear to have met or spoken with any of the important scientists or organizations working on restoration (this according to our friend Beth Wallace, who also tried to find out). But you can bet that they talked to plenty of Enbridge’s deep pool of public relations message massagers.
This morning, we’re a little irritated. Remember that story about those disturbing piles of petroleum coke, a byproduct of the dilbit refining process, that we reported on a couple of months ago? Well, the New York Timesran a piece by reporter Ian Austen on the story just this week– and it’s getting a lot of play. It’s all over the web and social media. And of course, we think this is a very good thing. In fact, the more attention this gets the better. The last thing we want is to have that gunk spilling into the Detroit River. And a national discussion about the costs of using this filthy byproduct– what one expert in the article calls “the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth”– is long overdue. So, three cheers for Ian Austen and the New York Times. Well, make that two cheers.
Why are we irritated? Two reasons:
First, because the main reason the story seems to be getting so much play– and perhaps a major reason why the Times picked it up in the first place (two months after the story broke here in Michigan)– is because the petcoke can now be linked to the Koch brothers, those wealthy conservative super-villains (to people on the left). Linking this story to the Kochs makes for some good outrage. Here’s how Austen frames his piece:
Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.
And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.
The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.
The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November.
But in our view, it really shouldn’t matter; it shouldn’t make it any more concerning to know that the Koch brothers own that stuff. We’d find those piles of black dust on the shores of the river alarming if they were owned by our own brothers. The fact that this story has to be shoe-horned into a familiar ideological narrative in order to get it on the national radar is, we confess, bothersome– irritating.
The second reason we’re irritated is because the Times piece never says how that stuff– or the stuff that makes that stuff– got to Detroit in the first place. Instead, it says only this:
An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke, of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled. Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta. Much is just piled up there.
Detroit’s pile will not be the only one. Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States, which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here.
Marathon Petroleum’s plant in Detroit processes 28,000 barrels a day of the oil sands bitumen.
See what happened there? The Times went and pulled a Stabenow on its readers (if we may coin a phrase). That is, just at the moment when one might expect an explanation of how Enbridge’s Line 6B– the line that ruptured in Marshall in the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history– feeds diluted bitumen to that Marathon refinery, at that very moment, instead of rehearsing a bit of Enbridge history in Michigan and beyond, Austen turns to a discussion of… Keystone XL! Never mind that Enbridge, as we’ve said before, is quietly building its own KXL. Never mind that Marathon’s plant is about to increase production by more than half because of the” replacement” of Line 6B (thereby producing even more petroleum coke). To the Times, it’s as if Enbridge and Line 6B don’t exist. Once again, as with Senator Stabenow’s staff, Keystone appears to be the only game in town.
A couple of weeks back, we promised the launch of a new series about our experience tagging along with a pack of journalists brought together by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. You really should check that link; we’re quite smitten with the work the Institute does. in our view, their model should be replicated across the country and we’re totally impressed with Dave Spratt and Adam Hinterthuer. Today, we’re happy to bring you the first installment on our day with them at their Kalamazoo River Institute.
Dave and Adam invited us, along with phase two landowner David Gallagher (we’ll more on his story in another installment), to speak to the journos about our experience with the Line 6B replacement. And one of the journalists, Mark Brooks from Earthgauge Radio up in Canada has posted audio of much of our remarks. Even better, Dave and Adam were gracious enough to let us tag along with the group for most of the day. Since this was, believe it or not, our first-ever trip to Marshall and the site of the “dilbit disaster,” we were lucky to have the NWF’s Beth Wallace as an escort. On our way to the first stop of the day– the spot where Talmadge Creek meets the Kalamazoo River– we got to see the creek for the very first time. Here it is, quite lovely:
This shot is about a mile downcreek from the rupture. The creek carried the oil, which spilled over the banks more than 10 feet on either side, another half mile to the Kalamazoo River, which is where we met up with the journalists for a canoe trip a couple of miles in length all the way to Ceresco Dam, a key cleanup site following the spill and still today. At the landing where we launched is a new park, created by Enbridge. It’s very nice, which seems like a wonderful thing until you learn that on the day of the spill, the site was home to the Jeffery family, who had been there for 53 years. The sign, which cheerfully notes that “in 2011, the property was converted into a public park to enhance the community’s experience on the Kalamazoo River,” is a disturbing example of historical erasure: it makes no mention of WHY the property “was converted” into a public park– because Enbridge’s decaying pipeline ruptured, dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of diluted bitumen into the river and ruining the Jefferys’ property.
A bridge runs over the river at the park. If you look closely here, you can see a black line about a foot above the water; that line was left there by the oil, showing just how high the river was on the day of the spill. The line also serves, or se we thought, as another barely perceptible reminder of what happened in 2010. Of course, as with the plaque commemorating the Jeffrey property, one might never know that this is the site of one of the worst inland oil spills in U.S. history. The signs remain, but one needs an experienced semiotician to decipher them. (In our case, we had Beth Wallace and Jay Wesley of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to give us the real story.)
And this is more or less the story of the Kalamazoo River as it currently exists. It has been scrubbed clean– washed, dredged, cleared, and restored. But it’s been scrubbed clean not just of dilbit (well, almost scrubbed clean of dilbit!). It’s also been scrubbed clean (again, almost) of why and how it was scrubbed clean. Because so much of the property along the river was purchased– by necessity– by Enbridge, there are no explicit references to the spill, its causes and its aftermath. That history is knowable only by subtle marks and traces, like the story the Jeffery family sign does not tell, like the black line left behind on the concrete bridge that only experts know about, Or by mile markers like the one below, which indicate the distance the oil flowed downriver (what do they signify to those who do not know the story of the spill?). Or by some Enbridge workers in orange vests doing who-knows-what at the river’s edge (this being a group of journalists, you can rest assured that they descended on those guys like a pack of wolves).
Just how clean has the Kalamazoo River been cleaned? Well, one experienced journalist-kayaker (not the person pictured: that’s Beth Wallace looking right at home kayaking) remarked upon how the river seemed to lack “structure.” That is, the farther you traveled along it, you had this odd feeling like the beauty of the river was somehow a little off, a little too neat, too tidy. There were no obstructions– no big rocks, no fallen trees, none of those things that a river just accumulates over the ages, the things that provide a habitat for all manner of critters: sunbathing spots for turtles, bivouacs for fish.
So what you come to realize is that the Kalamazoo River, although quite nice, is now a man-made river, an artificial river, the kind of river one might encounter at, say, Disneyland. Honestly, it put us in mind of some fancy French theorizing we read way back in graduate school. In the 1980s, a theorist by the name of Jean Baudrillard wrote a little book called Simulacra and Simulations (in French). Baudrillard’s idea was that the world we now inhabit (the “postmodern” world) is so full of copies and reproductions (you can walk the streets of New York in a Las Vegas casino; you can visit Paris by going to Disney in Florida) that we have not only lost the “real.” Reality itself now seems to imitate the copies of reality. As Baudrillard puts it, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory.”
Take Talmadge Creek, for instance: one of the most striking things we learned on our trip was that in order to clean it up, Enbridge essentially had to destroy the creek. They excavated a swath thirty feet wide (the creek is maybe three or four feet wide)– creek bed, vegetation, everything. Then they basically recreated the creek. How? Well, apparently based on Google map images, making Talmadge Creek a creek that quite literally copies a map. This is a textbook example of what Baudrillard called the “hyperreal.” Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River (a portion of it, anyway) are no longer “real” bodies of water. They are hyperreal. They are Enbridge’s recreations of bodies of water, corporation-created creeks and rivers that mimic real creeks and rivers. So when you walk along Talmadge Creek or you canoe the Kalamazoo, you are having an experience owned, operated, and created by Enbridge– whether you know it or not.
So while the river was, to the inexperienced eye, very clean, and while the canoe trip was quite pleasant on a beautiful May day, after thinking about all of this, after reminding ourselves of how the river came to be the river it is today, we still felt a little dirty.
Whew! The semester has finally ended, grades have been recorded, and we finally have a little time to post. To compensate for the recent lull, we’re pleased to announce the launch of a new series! This past Friday, we were fortunate to participate in an exciting program. The excellent people at the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources were generous enough to let us tag along with their 16 (or so) Fellows– journalists from all over the country and Canada– for a portion of their Kalamazoo River Institute. Jennifer Bowman of the Battle Creek Enquirerhas a story on the Institute this morning.
Friday was devoted to the Marshall disaster and its aftermath. The journalists met and interviewed officials from the EPA, the Michigan DNR and DEQ, representatives from Enbridge (well, Jason Manshum), MSU scientist Steve Hamilton (who at this point probably knows more about cleaning up dilbit than anyone on the planet), our friends Beth Wallace from the NWF, Josh Mogerman from the NRDC (nice to finally meet him in person!), and Sue Connolly and Deb Miller. We also made new friends in fellow landowners (on phase 2) David and Karin Gallagher– we’ll bring you their grisly story in the second installment of the series– who graciously invited all of the Institute participants to their home.
One of the highlights of the day was a canoe trip along a two-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River, following the path of the oil. Although there’s more to be done, the good news is that the river is bouncing back and it really is quite beautiful. Here’s a shot:
In all, it was a terrific experience and we’re deeply grateful to Dave Spratt and Adam Hinterthuer from IJNR for letting us tag along and speak to the journalists. We met lots of smart, interesting people– and we’re looking forward to seeing what kinds of stories the fellows produce. But as we wait, we plan to do some ruminating of our own on the experience in a few installments. In the meantime, here’s a video from the Battle Creek Enquirer taken at Dave Gallagher’s house. If you watch closely, you might even catch us in a brief (but silent) cameo!
The pipeline company responsible for the 2010 tar sands oil spill that fouled almost 40 miles of the Kalamazoo River is refusing to pay $800,000 to complete two new studies to assess the spill’s damage.
Trustees of the National Resource Damage Assessment, an effort to assess the damage caused by oil spills and other hazards, wants Enbridge to participate in the studies, which involve vegetation and recreational use in the area affected by the spill.
The group comprises state and federal agencies, such as the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as two tribal governments.
But Enbridge notified trustees in June and October that it was “declining to cooperate” because adequate data had already been collected.
Here we have yet another example of something we have discussed repeatedly over the past eight months: Enbridge’s unwillingness to take full and complete responsibility for the Marshall spill. Instead, they only pretend to take responsibility. Mostly, they want to pretend that the Marshall debacle is over and done with; they want desperately just to move on. We’ve covered numerous examples of this:
The point in all of those cases (and others) has always been the same: Enbridge seems not to understand what it means to truly take responsibility. They seem to think that somehow they get to decide when things have been made right. But truly taking responsibility means leaving that determination up to those whom you have wronged, or those in a position to decide when the situation you created has been rectified, when the mess you have made has been cleaned up.
What’s even worse is that in the face of that disaster and Enbridge’s refusal to fully take responsibility for it, the good people of the state of Michigan have STILL allowed Enbridge to build a new pipe that will increase the capacity of oil they can transport and thereby increase their profits– by millions and millions of dollars.
This week (or so) is just about (we don’t remember the precise day) the one year anniversary of the day an Enbridge ROW agent showed up at our door (yes, armed with condemnation papers– even though at that time Enbridge had not technically been given that power yet. But what did we know, all green and wet behind the ears?!). Looking back on the year that has been, we can’t say we’d want to relive it all over again. But it has had its bright spots: as we’ve said many times, we’ve gotten to know some really marvelous people. And, at the very least, it’s been awfully interesting. How much we’ve learned!
It has also, at times, been more than a little weird. In fact, we’ve got and handful of weird items to share. We’ll start with just one and save the others for later posts:
First up, some old news that we were reminded of this morning during Nate Pavlovic’s excellent Line 6B webinar. (If you missed it, the recording is available now. It’s well worth your time, especially if you’re in Indiana). Anyway, Nate included a picture of one of the oddest things that’s come out of the Marshall spill. When the Kalamazoo River reopened last summer, containers were installed along the riverbank containing wipes, so that when swimmers and boaters get out of the river they can clean the oil off of themselves and their vessels. It’s just like nature intended! Come to think of it, maybe these wipe dispensers are what those political staffers we spoke to were talking about when they told us the Kalamazoo River was cleaner than ever— a phrase that was surely picked up from Enbridge.
Forgive us for this morning’s flurry; it’s just that the latest media effort featuring a couple of Enbridge heavy-hitters—Stephen Wuori, the president of the Liquids Pipelines Division, and Thomas Hodge, Line 6B Project Manager— have got us all on fire. We’ve already discussed Hodge’s dismissive characterization of landowner displeasure (twice now). But we’ve yet to take a look at Wuori’s comments. Partly that’s because the Lansing State Journal doesn’t quote him at all.
In retrospect, that may have been a good idea, because when Wuori does speak (to the Daily Press & Argus) it does not go well. This is what Wuori says about Marshall:
Wuori said the 2010 oil spill has been unfairly represented in the press, namely claims that Enbridge had knowledge of how to prevent the spill but didn’t act on it.
Wuori said the spill was caused by a series of cracks in that section of Line 6B, and that company officials did not have prior knowledge that line break would occur.
This is extraordinary. Two years later and top executives from Enbridge are STILL, as our friend Susan Connolly pointed out yesterday, unwilling to take full responsibility for Marshall? They’re still portraying themselves as victims of unfair treatment by the press? Even if what Wuori says here were true (and we’re getting to that), how can he not recognize that this sort of self-presentation is a very poor way to try and win people over?
But let’s get to the facts. Wuori appears not to have read the NTSB report. We don’t know what “claims that Enbridge had knowledge of how to prevent the spill” he’s talking about, exactly. But we do know what the NTSB says about Enbridge’s knowledge of the series of cracks that eventually caused the pipe to rupture. Let’s review:
Among the NTSB’s most important findings was:
The inadequacy of Enbridge’s integrity management program to accurately assess and remediate crack defects. Enbridge’s crack management program relied on a single in-line inspection technology to identify and estimate crack sizes. Enbridge used the resulting inspection reports to perform engineering assessments without accounting for uncertainties associated with the data, tool, or interactions between cracks and corrosion. A 2005 Enbridge engineering assessment and the company’s criteria for excavation and repair showed that six crack-like defects ranging in length from 9.3 to 51.6 inches were left in the pipeline, unrepaired, until the July 2010 rupture.
In other words, in contradiction to Wuori’s claim, Enbridge DID have knowledge of serious “crack-like defects” in the pipe, the very defects that caused the rupture. Yet they failed to repair them– for FIVE years.
Again, the NTSB:
The Enbridge crack management plan operated under the premise that defects in an aging pipeline with disbonded coating could be managed using a single in-line inspection technology and that prioritization of crack defects for excavation and remediation could be effectively managed through engineering assessments based strictly on the crack tool inspection data.
The program did not account for errors associated with in-line inspections and the interaction of multiple defects on a pipeline. The 51.6-inch-long crack-like feature that eventually led to the Line 6B rupture was one of six features that had been detected on the ruptured segment during an in-line inspection conducted by Enbridge’s integrity management program in 2005. Non-detection and improper classification of the defect are inherent risks when relying solely on in-line inspection data to ensure the integrity of the pipeline, yet for nearly 5 years following the inspection, the integrity management program failed to identify the 51.6-inch crack feature located adjacent to the weld as a threat to the pipeline.
And here are a few more of the NTSB’s findings about Enbridge’s failure to adequately address the crack issue:
Enbridge applied a lower margin of safety when assessing crack defects versus when assessing corrosion defects.
In 2005, Enbridge had no procedure that accounted for the interaction between corrosion and cracking and the potential influence on crack depth reporting.
Enbridge did not have a procedure to account for wall loss due to corrosion when it was evaluating the in-line inspection crack-tool-reported data and was preparing the excavation list.
Enbridge integrity management did not adequately address the effects of a corrosive environment on crack growth rates.
Enbridge’s crack management program and reinspection interval selection is inadequate because it fails to consider all potential crack growth mechanisms that are prevalent in its pipeline.
So, did Enbridge “company officials have prior knowledge that line break would occur”? Well, Wuori’s way of putting it suggests that they couldn’t have had a crystal ball– and that’s probably true. So no, maybe they didn’t “know that line break would occur.” But, did company officials know (for five years) that there were serious defects in the pipe? Yes, they did. And did they also know that such defects could, possibly, lead to line break? Certainly. Yet, according to the NTSB, they chose not to take steps necessary to prevent it. These aren’t mere representations in the press; these are the facts discovered by an exhaustive investigation conducted by a federal agency.
Well, the Wuori-Hodge road show/media blitz continues. My goodness how they’re accessible to the media these days. We wonder why? And as you can imagine, we’ve got LOTS to say about this one. We’re working on it. Meantime, we’ll just say that we sure wish these guys would sit down for some questions from OUR editorial board.
Lately, we’ve been thinking our way through the conversation we had a week ago Wednesday with Enbridge Vice President Mark Sitek. Rather than providing a transcript from memory of that conversation, we’ve touched upon some of its highlights to try and understand– even to diagnose– the malady that plagues Enbridge (in our view). So far, we’ve discussed Enbridge’s insularity and the difficulty they seem to have looking at matters from the point of view of others– obviously, those two things are related.
In our third installment, we will consider another related trait: the trouble Enbridge seems to have taking accountability for its actions.
Yesterday, we launched our new series centering upon the telephone conversation we had Wednesday with Enbridge Vice President Mark Sitek. We’re using that exchange as an opportunity to try and diagnose and account for the condition that causes Enbridge to act in ways that alienate landowners and the general public (not to mention other stakeholders). In the first installment of the series we discussed Enbridge’s defensiveness, its tendency to portray itself as unfairly victimized. The basic thesis of that post was two-fold. We suggested that (1) it’s absurd for the party that wields all the power, has all the resources, and nearly always gets its way to pose as the victim; and (2) that such a pose is the result of an extreme insularity that prevents Enbridge from seeing things from a broader perspective. For that matter, we suggested at the very end of our post, Enbridge seems to have trouble adopting any perspective other than its own narrow one.
In this our second installment, we’ll take up that last point, which is all the more important because it is one of Enbridge’s stated core values. As part of their commitment to “Respect,” Enbridge states that its employees will “take the time to understand the perspective of others.” This, along with their other values, is what Enbridge describes as “a constant beacon by which we make our decisions, as a company and as individual employees, every day.”
Part 2: Understanding the Perspective of Others (more…)
