The worst oil spill into an inland waterway in U-S history happened right here in Michigan, 10 years ago this week [SAT JULY 25].
It happened on a Sunday evening. 5:58 p.m. on July 25th, 2010. Enbridge’s Line 6B was carrying a dark, thick oil from Canada’s tar sands. The pipeline split open in a wetland near the small town of Marshall.
Oil gushed into Talmadge Creek, then the Kalamazoo River, polluting almost 40 river miles. Enbridge estimated more than 840-thousand gallons of oil spilled. The EPA put the amount at more than 1 million gallons.
People who lived near the spill site, like Debbie Trescott, said there was an intense smell hanging in the air that Sunday.
“I smelled this oil or gas or something," said Trescott "It was just a horrible smell and I knew then that something must be wrong.”
But Enbridge did not realize anything was wrong for more than 17 hours.
The control room operators were far away, in Alberta.
A federal investigation later found those operators thought they had a pressure problem in the pipeline. They shut the pipeline down twice. And twice, they restarted it, sending massive amounts of oil through the ruptured pipeline.
81 percent of the oil that spilled was a result of those mistakes.
“The situation is very serious.”
That’s then-Governor Jennifer Granholm.
People who lived nearby… or spent time on the Kalamazoo River said the river ran black.
“The water going over the rocks didn’t sound like water going over the rocks. It almost sounded like a kid sucking on a super thick milkshake I mean it was just (makes milkshake noises).”
“I think I can sum it up in one word and that is nightmare. The smell, I don’t even know how to describe the smell, there are no words. You could not be outside.”
That was Craig Ritter and Deb Miller.
Miller told us in 2011 she had health problems that lasted for months after the spill.
“The headaches were just absolutely intense, watering eyes. The cough, it was chronic.”
In late 2010, the state health department issued a report on acute health effects from the oil spill. The report says people in the area had headaches, nausea and respiratory symptoms.
In the early days, there was a major wildlife rescue effort. Turtles, and muskrats and great blue herons were covered in oil. Rescue teams collected more than two thousand birds and animals.
Back then, herpetologist Dave Mifsud said turtles made up the most of the wildlife rescued from the spill site.
“We had some, that were, their mouths were so tacky with the oil they could barely open their mouths," says Mifsud. "We saw some pretty devastating things.”
The state is still monitoring the health of aquatic life in the area. The river re-opened for recreation in 2012. But it took many years to clean up and restore the river.
The main reason? The kind of oil that was spilled. Because it was so heavy and thick, a lot of it sank to the bottom of the river. Federal and state officials said that made the cleanup more difficult.
Two years after the spill, crews were still searching for oil on the bottom of the Kalamazoo River.
Here’s Mark Ducharme with the state’s environment agency in 2012:
“We’re writing the book on how to clean up oil sands out of cold water streams in freshwater systems," Ducharme said. "We’ve been looking elsewhere, we’ve been trying to find other examples – they’re just not there.”
An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board said the pipeline ruptured because of corrosion and cracking. It found that Enbridge was aware of six crack-like defects in Line 6B FIVE YEARS before the pipeline broke open. But did nothing to fix them.
In a statement, Enbridge spokesman Ryan Duffy says the company transformed itself as a result of the spill. He says since 2011, Enbridge has invested more than $8 billion dollars on maintenance, inspection and leak detection across its crude-oil pipeline system. And he says they’ve added staff to the control center and revised their procedures.
Carl Weimer heads the watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust. He agrees: some things have improved since the Kalamazoo spill.
But he says there’s one major thing that has not changed in the past decade.
Pipeline companies STILL do their own inspections.
“You know the regulators, when they say they inspect pipelines, they’re inspecting the paperwork, they’re not going out there and inspecting the pipeline, for the most part," Weimer says. "So you have to trust the companies and you have to trust that the regulators are at least spending enough time on the paperwork and overseeing the company that there’s some hope there.”
And Weimer says Michigan could change its laws and ask the federal government for permission to take on more oversight of oil pipelines.
“I’m kind of surprised the state of Michigan hasn’t done that.”
Weimer says the spill also woke a lot of people up to the existence of the pipelines that crisscross our region.
“I think a lot of the attention you’re seeing on Enbridge lines in, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, some of the tribal issues in northern Wisconsin, certainly the Line 5 now has all been heightened because of Enbridge’s spill,” said Weimer.
He says there is a lot more attention now to how pipeline companies assess their risks. But he says it’s unfortunate that in the U.S. we often don’t change laws or the way we do things until after a tragedy happens.