by Jeffrey Insko | Jan 11, 2013 |
We have long said that Enbridge’s problems with landowners are easily fixed; it’s just not that complicated. It is so uncomplicated, in fact, that even a child gets it. Here’s proof, courtesy of Kim Savage’s 9 year old son Shaun:
And here is a clear illustration of how Shaun’s system would work:
Thanks to Shaun for letting us publish his solution. We hope Enbridge sees it. Incidentally, we can’t help noting that Shaun’s not just a clever problem solver and a fine artist; he’s also an exceedingly well-behaved young man.
by Jeffrey Insko | Jan 8, 2013 |
Typically, the end of a year and the beginning of another is a time for some reflection. In fact, over the break we were thinking of compiling some “Top Ten” lists in the ordinary “Year in Review” sort of way (a totally unoriginal idea, we realize). Perhaps we still will if we can get to it soon, before the idea has gone completely stale.
Anyway, here is one fun fact that came out of our preliminary looking back over the year: this blog is almost exactly six months old (honestly, it feels older). And in that time, we generated 251 posts (we kicked things off with Marshall, of course!). That averages out to 41 posts a month– more than one a day! Why mention this? Well, partly to say (apologetically) that there is no way we can continue on that furious pace. Honestly, it’s not good for our sanity and, truth be told, not all that good for our “regular” career, either. So while we have no intention of giving the blog up– far too much still demands our attention and the fact is that we’ve grown rather devoted to you, our readers and new friends– we will be posting less frequency in the near term, a few times a week, not a few times a day. We hope you won’t mind if the pace slows!
But speaking of things that still require our attention and vigilance: phase two continues to make its way through the MPSC approval process and it probably won’t be wrong before that approval is granted. But there have been some interesting filings lately (last month). We’ve been looking them over and plan to make this the basis of a new series. Stay tuned for that.
There’s also last month’s “Construction Update” newsletter. We’ve got some things to say about that as well. Plus, it will afford another opportunity to crack a few jokes about Enbridge mascot “Dr. Michael Milan.”
Also, judging from all the new flags decorating our road, it looks like construction activity is about to heat up around here. We’ll watch and take photos.
Finally, there’s a bit of unfinished business from last year we haven’t given up on: the long promised post on the environmental panel at the PS Trust conference, what we learned about Line 6B “exceeding” federal regulations, and a few other things we’ve been mulling over for a long time, like our theory about how Enbridge seems to still be living in the 20th century. We’re continuing to keep our eye on things down in Indiana as well.
We hope you’ll stick around for all of it!
by Jeffrey Insko | Jan 7, 2013 |
Happy New Year, everyone! We’re very sorry for our recent silence. As it turns out, syllabuses do not write themselves and the first semester of 2013 has brought with it far too many early tasks. Not to make excuses for neglecting the Line 6B blog, but we can tell you that we’ve been doing a lot more work this first week of the year than have Enbridge’s pipeline construction crews!
We’ve missed you all tremendously and hope that your holidays, however you celebrated them, were full of food, drink, and conviviality. We were certainly refreshed and pleased to spend some time in our hometown with family and friends. But being out of town for the holidays also meant that we didn’t receive our little Enbridge surprise until well after our fellow landowners received theirs. Yet sure enough, we returned home to a big box:
And what was inside that box? Well, lots of chocolate covered-cherries*, along with a card saying, “Thanks for your patience. Happy Holidays from your neighbors at Enbridge.”
Now, our mother taught us our manners too well for us to be un-gracious for this unexpected gift.** And we have to admit that it was a pretty nice touch, especially so since Enbridge had the good sense to pick a Michigan company (and Glen Arbor, the home of Cherry Republic, is in fact one of our favorite places on all of planet earth). So we have to say, sincerely, thank you, Enbridge. This was a nice surprise.
Yet, however nice the surprise, we can’t resist asking a few questions and making a couple of brief remarks:
We’re assuming everyone else on the route received the same gift? Did people who have yet to settle with Enbridge receive anything? And did “Dr. Michael Milan” receive something extra special? A new hunting jacket, perhaps? Maybe a gun rack for his pickup truck?
Also, we do wish that Enbridge would drop the “your neighbor” stuff. Unless this is part of a new year’s resolution and they really are going to start behaving like neighbors, we really think the “good neighbor” rhetorical ship has long since sailed. To keep it up in the absence of genuine neighborliness is just offensive.
And finally, we’re sure they didn’t intend it, but the card that came with the gift is rather unfortunate. We don’t know about yours, but this is what our card looked like:
The tree, of course, is a little troubling, since it really just serves as a cruel reminder of all the trees Enbridge removed from our backyard that we will never ever be able to replace. And it’s all the worse, of course, since implicit in a card like this is some sort of appreciation for the aesthetic value of trees, something we know first hand that means nothing whatsoever to Enbridge.
Equally unfortunate is that flowing body of water at the foot of the tree. It looks to us ominously dark. Surely it’s not… Talmadge Creek?!
Again, happy new year, everybody. We’re glad to be back!
* All these cherries remind us of a strange passage at the very end of Moby-Dick, one that has always baffled us. Just before Ahab goes down with the whale, his second mate Stubb sees the whale bearing down on him and exclaims,
Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though; – cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”
We’ve never fully understood why all of a sudden Stubb starts thinking about cherries. Feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves in the comments section.
** On the subject of manners, see this wonderful bit by our friend Kim Savage.
by Jeffrey Insko | Dec 18, 2012 |
Over the past several days, we fought and clawed and wriggled our way out from under a mountain of student papers. It wasn’t easy and at times a little painful, but we got through it and we’re finally breathing fresh air again. You will be happy, or perhaps completely indifferent, to know that some students actually seemed to learn a thing or two.
At any rate, our burden has been lifted and we’re feeling free.
There is a little bit of news to catch up on. There’s been a lot of construction activity on our property the past week or so (and absolutely none in a lot of places). And we’ve got lots of pictures and video to share with you, hopefully today. In the meantime, here are a few items of note:
We hope all of our wonderful readers are enjoying these balmy pre-holiday days!
by Jeffrey Insko | Dec 11, 2012 |
No sooner had we finished up our latest post about Enbridge’s apparently congenital inability to deal with stakeholders straightforwardly than we were provided with yet another illustration of the phenomenon in the form of the latest news from Brandon Township. Sadly, it doesn’t surprise us.
The Brandon Trustees held another meeting last night, where they were expected to sign and finalize their agreement with Enbridge. We took the night off and did not attend the meeting, though we’ve received a report of it. And just as we predicted, things did not go smoothly. Therefore, no agreement has been signed.
There are a couple of sticking points: understandably (in our opinion), the Trustees are concerned about the limited scope of the oversight granted to the township’s inspector (we thought the same thing when we read the proposed agreement). And secondly, apparently Enbridge did not want to put anything in the agreement about their environmental stewardship program. In our view, this is especially disturbing since these are the two elements of the agreement that will be most important to other townships. Given that fact, however, it’s not so surprising that Enbridge would hedge about them. And to make it all worse, Enbridge has apparently re-started construction in Brandon–without a signed agreement. This is, in our view and the Board’s (as we understand it), not only presumptuous, but a slap in the face.
For now, we’ll just say this: it gives us no great joy to say “I told you so.” But all of this is exactly what we told the new Brandon board two weeks ago. As we reported then, we told them:
Based on [our] experience, what will happen is fairly predictable: Enbridge will show up, smile, talk about working together and being good neighbors; they’ll say lots of pleasing-sounding things; they’ll try and make it look like they really do want to work with the Township; they’ll also patronize and condescend (because they can’t help it)– and then they’ll leave and continue to try and do whatever it is they want.
And this is exactly what has happened. Jeff Axt saw it coming, too. It’s why both of us pleaded with the board at the last meeting to proceed cautiously, despite Enbridge’s pressure to hurry them up. But then, everybody has to learn their own Enbridge lessons. We trust that the new Board– now that they’ve seen Enbridge thumb its nose at them, just as they did the old board– has learned theirs.
by Jeffrey Insko | Dec 10, 2012 |
We know it’s been a few days since we’ve posted anything. That’s because it’s end-of-the-semester crunch time when things get crazy. In fact, we’re about to be buried under a frightening avalanche of student papers. But we’re trying to steal away some time to provide some updates. We just today procured a copy of the final Brandon-Enbridge agreement, so we’ll be writing about that. We’re also well into an account of our frosty chat with Mark Curwin and Tom Hodge at last week’s Brandon meeting.
We also haven’t forgotten that we STILL haven’t posted on the last of Enbridge’s Freep ads (and we’ve got a good counter-narrative for that one). And we also STILL haven’t wrapped up our PS Trust conference series. We want to tell you about the great environmental panel.
But to tide you over, we’ll offer a few things (and beg patience):
- Our friend Peter LaFontaine of the National Wildlife Federation has an nice blog post about the excellent Tar Sands report he recently published. Check it out. Please read the report also. It’s vital.
- News outlets over in Macomb county are starting to pick up on the story of phase two of the Line 6B project. Here’s one account. The article is a reminder that all of this is far from over. We hope to provide whatever help and information we can for our neighbors to the east.
- Lastly, we don’t know what’s happening around your home, but activity in our immediate neighborhood has picked up considerably in the past week. We’ll take and post some pictures as soon as we have time.
by Jeffrey Insko | Nov 26, 2012 |
We are back home after a nice Thanksgiving break. We hope everyone enjoyed their family time as much as we did– but didn’t eat quite as much as we did. Looking out back, we notice that no new work has taken place on our property.
A couple of ugly stories have emerged that we’ll be telling in the next few days, along with some other items of note. And we continue to await some sort of word from Judge Cleland’s federal courtroom.
In the meantime, here are a few cringeworthy stories. One is out of Canada, where evidently Enbridge is (big surprise) being less than forthright. The other is from here in Michigan– another unhappy landowner, but not on Line 6B. And finally, there’s the news of a new crude oil leak from an Enbridge pipe in Illinois. But don’t worry because “Enbridge spokesman Graham White said there was little environmental or operational impact” (though others might suggest that it’s part of a pattern).
Welcome back, everybody. We missed you.
by Jeffrey Insko | Nov 17, 2012 |
It was a beautiful late-autumn day today, so we tried not to think about Enbridge for a while. It was a nice break. So here is a picture of Sam the dog. We went for a run.
by Jeffrey Insko | Nov 15, 2012 |
A few brief items of notes this morning:
- Federal suit: The latest news on the POLAR lawsuit in federal court is that Brandon Township, which on Nov. 5 filed a motion to join the suit, has also filed a motion to expedite a ruling on their filing (as of now, they are still not an official party to the suit). In response, Enbridge has filed a reply– a rather whiny one, in our opinion– suggesting that Brandon for some reason deliberately waited until the last minute to intervene. They also suggest that Brandon’s intervention has no bearing on Enbridge’s motion to dismiss the case, a motion based on the idea (as we’ve discussed before) that POLAR lacks standing. It will come as no surprise that we think both of those arguments are exceedingly weak. And reading Enbridge’s half-hearted response filing, it seems to us that they also know they’re weak. But we’ll see.
- Phase 2: Things are moving on phase 2 of the Line 6B project. When we returned home from the fantastic Pipeline Safety Trust conference late last week, we found a glossy new full-color newsletter from Enbridge providing lots of details on the project (in fairness, more details, perhaps, than we’ve ever seen before). We’ve got things to say about this interesting publication; we’ll get to it anon. The project is still making its way through the MPSC process; a hearing with witnesses was held just this week. One thing this means is that it’s high time to reach out to landowners along this next phase, to share information, and organize a little. If you happen to be on phase 2, perhaps you could drop us a note backchannel; we’d like to find ways to get in touch with as many affected landowners as possible. Stay tuned for more on this.
- Ad series: We haven’t forgotten about last week’s Free Press ad. We’re sort of excited about the response we’re working on.
- Photos: We’ll post some pictures from our recent reconnaissance tour soon. We’re still waiting to receive your entries for the photo contest (which isn’t really a contest, of course!). We don’t know exactly what’s happening up and down the line these days, but we can report that there has been no construction activity at all on our property in several days now. Things appear to be at something of a standstill. We suspect this is because agreements haven’t been reached with a number of nearby landowners. At this point, it looks as if Enbridge is installing a pipe to nowhere from nowhere.
- Reading: Lastly, over at the NRDC Switchboard blog our friend Anthony Swift has a very trenchant (as always) post refuting industry claims about dilbit. We think Anthony’s piece should be required reading.
by Jeffrey Insko | Nov 14, 2012 |
We live in a crazy world. The Precision Pipeline flag blunder story received a fair amount of attention yesterday. After the Detroit Free Press printed the photo, a handful of other news outlets picked it up (for instance, here and here and here) and it made some rounds on Facebook and probably got some tweets as well. There were even a few new details: evidently, it wasn’t a corporate flag, but a Penn State flag, placed there by a couple of employees– themselves veterans, according to a Precision representative.
We confess to some misgivings about all of this. Our original post was meant to be cheeky. Aside from the breach of U.S. flag etiquette, which probably ought not to be dismissed, we just found the image an amusing metaphor for some of the disregard and thoughtlessness Enbridge and some of its contractors have displayed toward landowners, local municipalities, and the citizens of Michigan– things we’ve been documenting with grave seriousness for months. If it were up to us, we’d much prefer to see this story or this one or this one (to name a few) receiving lots of attention.
Still, it bothers us if it is true that the persons responsible for raising the Penn State flag may face disciplinary action, as the Free Press headline states. That would be an unfortunate unintended consequence of this and we would regret having a hand in it; surely those men meant no real harm– even though it was clearly not a good idea to hang that flag the way they did.
Furthermore, it is probably also true that this little dust-up will look to Enbridge like another example of how they just can’t get a fair shake, how their every little move (or even moves they don’t themselves make) becomes fodder for critics looking to bash them at every turn. We can understand that. It’s surely one reason why so many Enbridge representatives– Denise Hamsher at the Pipeline Safety Trust conference last week is a case in point– often seem so defensive.
Yet Enbridge also has to take responsibility for creating the atmosphere of mistrust and antagonism that causes people to view their every move (and the moves of their associates) with such suspicion. That’s the consequence of their mishandling (to put it charitably) of Marshall, of their attempt to steamroll their way through this replacement project, of their flouting of local ordinances and their dismissal of local authority, of their unfair treatment of landowners, of their violations of line list agreements, and of the dozens of evasive, misleading, and counterfactual statements in public and in private from their spokespersons and ROW agents. Those are the things that, ultimately, generated this little flag flap. As Beth Duman herself has said before, if it weren’t for all of that bad behavior, we wouldn’t be paying attention to Enbridge or (Precision Pipeline) at all.
