The hidden, long-term effects of the 2010 pipeline accident that
spilled more than a million gallons of heavy Canadian crude oil into
Michigan’s Kalamazoo River became public last week when the EPA revealed
that large amounts of oil are still accumulating in three areas of the
river.The problem is so serious that the
EPA is asking
Enbridge Inc.,
the Canadian pipeline operator, to dredge approximately 100 acres of
the river. During the original cleanup effort, dredging was limited to
just 25 acres because the EPA wanted to avoid destroying the river’s
natural ecology. The additional work could take up to a year and add
tens of millions of dollars to a cleanup that has already cost Enbridge
$809 million.
The EPA notified Enbridge of its proposed order on Oct. 3, saying the
additional clean-up is “critical” and the work “should be conducted in
an expeditious manner” to remove the oil before it recontaminates the
river.
“The increased accumulation demonstrates that submerged oil is mobile
and migrating, evidencing that submerged oil removal is warranted to
prevent downstream migration … ,” Ralph Dollhopf, the EPA’s on-scene
coordinator and Incident Commander, said in the letter notifying
Enbridge of the agency’s findings.
In June an
InsideClimate News investigation revealed that the cleanup of the Kalamazoo has been unusually difficult, because the pipeline that ruptured was carrying
dilbit,
a mixture of heavy Canadian bitumen that has been diluted with liquid
chemicals, some of them toxic. Bitumen, also known as tar sands oil, has
the consistency of peanut butter and is too heavy to flow through
pipelines without being thinned with chemicals. When Pipeline 6B split
open, the chemicals began evaporating and the reconstituted
bitumen
began sinking to the river’s bottom.
“More than two years after the spill of diluted
bitumen, this
proposed order demonstrates that EPA is still tackling the problem of
how to remove the heavy oil from the Kalamazoo River,” said Sara Gosman,
an adjunct professor of environmental law and policy at the University
of Michigan Law School.
The EPA’s determination that more cleanup is needed was based on the
findings of a year-long survey of nearly 6,000 locations along the 40
miles of river contaminated when pipeline 6B ruptured in July 2010.
Enbridge has until next week to request a conference with the EPA to
discuss the additional work and 30 days to submit written comments.
Steve Hamilton,
a Michigan State University professor who was among the experts who
worked on the study, said the recommendation for dredging was driven by
concern that during flooding the pools of oil could break loose and
recontaminate parts of the river that have already been cleaned—or flow
downriver into areas that were never touched by the gooey oil.
Illustration of Line 6B rupture site. Photo: Catherine Mann.
“We will never get all of the oil out [of the river]. It’s
impossible,” Hamilton said. “The challenge is to determine when do you
get to a point of diminishing returns where the eradication is too
environmentally destructive to warrant the removal.”
A spokesman for the EPA said the agency would not have any comment beyond the information contained in
its proposed order and the
letter it sent to Enbridge.
The EPA acknowledged in the proposed order that Enbridge had
conducted substantial cleanup since the pipeline ruptured, but “despite
these response actions, oil remains in the Kalamazoo River.”
Enbridge did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But in
an Aug. 24 letter to the EPA, the company said it did not believe that more dredging—especially in the area near the Ceresco Dam—was necessary.
“Enbridge’s position is that we have reached a point of diminishing
returns where further invasive activities would do more harm than good,”
Richard Adams, Enbridge’s vice president of field operation in the
United States, said in the letter.
“In fact, we strongly believe that such action solely for the purpose
of aesthetics would both negatively impact the riverine environment and
create a significant disturbance and inconvenience to local landowners
and other river users.”
The company also disputed the EPA’s concern that oil is still pooling in the river, especially near the Ceresco Dam. “[T]he most significant evidence of submerged oil has been sheen
which, when collected, has amounted to a volume of less than 1 gallon of
product in total during 2012,” Adams wrote, referring to the area
around the dam.
Deb Miller, who lives near the dam in the community of Ceresco said
she sees rainbow sheens of oil floating on the surface when she walks
along the river near the carpet store she and her husband own. Recently
she ran a garden rake along the river’s bottom and said that
marble-sized globs of oil popped to the surface, accompanied by the sour
whiff of petroleum.
“It’s insane how much oil is still here,” said Miller, who has testified before Congress about the spill’s impact on her life.
Dilbit: The Unknown Factor
The National Transportation Safety Board
blasted Enbridge in
July for a “complete breakdown of safety” in the 2010 disaster, which
is considered the largest inland oil pipeline spill in U.S. history.
The report criticized the company for
failing to make repairs despite knowing of the defects five years
before the rupture. The Department of Transportation also imposed a
record $3.7 million civil penalty.
Enbridge paid the fine last month.
Enbridge has proposed replacing the entire 210-mile length of 6B from
Indiana to Ontario, Canada, at a cost of $1.3 billion. But the project
has faced
resistance from landowners who
are fighting the company’s efforts to condemn their land and from
lawsuits claiming Enbridge hasn’t complied with all state and local
regulations and environmental laws.
The study of the contaminated 40-mile section of the Kalamazoo that
resulted in the EPA’s directive began in 2011 and ended in August.The EPA enlisted 14 federal, state and local organizations—including
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality—to perform the study as
part of a Net Environmental Benefit Analysis to ensure the ongoing
cleanup was sufficient and further ecological damage from the spill
would be minimized.
Hamilton, the Michigan State University professor of ecology and environment, joined the team as a representative of the
Kalamazoo River Watershed Council.
He has done extensive research on the river and its flood plain and
spoke to InsideClimate News not as a representative of the EPA but as
one of the individual scientists who worked on the investigation.
Hamilton said the study relied on a technique called poling, where a
long pole is used to churn up the bottom of the river to see if oil or
residue floats to the surface. He said the poling identified about two
dozen sections of the river where enough oil remained to be of concern.
With those areas in mind, the scientists used a model of the river to
simulate floods equal to the high water marks of the last 100 years,
five years and the highest flood mark since the spill.
They were particularly attentive to the hundred year flood levels
despite the statistical improbability of such a flood occurring.
“With climate change it might be more possible than the record might indicate,” Hamilton said.
The recommendation for dredging was based on factors beyond
aesthetics, Hamilton said. One of the scientists’ primary worries was
that not much is known about dilbit.
“This kind of crude oil is a complex mix of hundreds of
compounds—some known to be toxic—that has not been studied much,” he
said. “We just don’t understand the consequences well enough.”
Congress has ordered a study, which is being conducted by the
National Academy of Sciences, to determine whether dilbit is more likely
than conventional oil to corrode pipelines. The study isn’t expected to
be finished until the summer of 2013.
Three Areas at Risk
The investigators decided that “sheen management”—a technique that
uses booms to contain oil floating to the surface—was appropriate for
most of the sections where they found pools of oil. But they concluded
that dredging was the only solution for three areas of the river between
Marshall and Kalamazoo, Mich. The vulnerable areas are upstream of
Ceresco Dam, upstream of the Battle Creek Dam in the Mill Ponds area,
and in the delta upstream of Morrow Lake. Together, they cover about 100
acres, an area about the size of 75 football fields.
Near the Ceresco Dam, the investigators discovered the area of
submerged oil had increased from 20 acres to 23.5 aces and that oil
globules were floating to the surface, according to the EPA’s proposed
order.
Because that area was subjected to what the EPA called “highly
effective” dredging in 2010, the agency concluded that additional
dredging would prove successful. The earlier dredging project lasted
about three weeks and crews carted away 5,500 cubic yards of oil-soaked
sediment from the river bottom, enough to fill 27 semi-trailers. An
estimated 14 million gallons of water was decontaminated and returned to
the river.
Mill Pond, the second section of the river cited for intense cleanup,
presented more of a quandary for the EPA. Some sections shouldn’t be
dredged, the agency decided, because the digging and scraping would do
too much damage to the sensitive ecology and because the submerged oil
wasn’t likely to move down river.
At the third proposed cleanup site, the Delta just upstream from
Morrow Lake, the investigators discovered a “substantial expansion” of
the submerged oil, with the plume now covering most of the two-mile
length of the delta, an area of about 55.5 acres.
Hamilton said the scientists decided dredging was needed, because
floods might dislodge the submerged oil and allow it to flow into a part
of the Kalamazoo River unblemished by the spill.
“It would be wise to get at it now when it’s practical before it
either becomes lodged in small backwater areas or migrates into areas
where oil has not been previously discovered,” he said.
By David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News
