As debate over the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline continues to rage, CTV News headed south to the site of one of the largest land-based oil spills in U.S. history to learn what a similar catastrophe could mean for British Columbia.
For residents of Marshall, Michigan, a community located roughly 100 kilometres west of Detroit, the trouble began on the morning of July 25, 2010. At 9:45 a.m., a pipeline cracked and burst that would eventually send more than three million litres of diluted bitumen gushing into local wetlands, a creek and the Kalamazoo River.
The company responsible: Enbridge, the same corporation behind the Northern Gateway pipeline proposed to pass from the Alberta tar sands to B.C.’s West Coast.
Marshall resident John Laforge spoke to CTV News last week at the periphery of his former front lawn. He and his family woke up one morning to find a stream of oil oozing across their property.
“When I saw the field over there and seen this yard, I knew it had to be a horrendous oil spill,” Laforge said.
Laforge is one of more than 200 property owners who sold their homes to Enbridge in the wake of the 2010 spill. He was paid $230,000 – roughly half the price his property had been assessed at just four years earlier – but says no amount of money can replace a family home, or the decades of history attached to it.
“It’s like leaving home and not coming back,” he said. “You can’t replace feelings, and they don’t care.”
Others say they received no compensation for the effect the spill had on their lives.
Judy Heppler, who owns a riverside driving range and mini-put course with her husband in nearby Battle Creek, also saw part of her property soaked with oil during the spill. To this day, golf balls are still returned with oil residue on them.
“This is what’s all over the golf balls when we were picking them up, and if it’s there it’s in our lungs – we’re breathing it,” Heppler said.
The couple lost several months of business during the cleanup, and watched as their property value plummeted. As they consider legal action against Enbridge, the Hepplers have a message for B.C.: when it comes to safety precautions, accept nothing but the best.
“You better be sure before you let them out in your back yard that they’ve got everything straightened out and taken care of, because you don’t want another thing like this to happen,” Heppler said.
Enbridge is emphatic that all affected Michigan residents were compensated fairly, that 95 per cent of the oil that spilled into the state’s river system has been removed, and the waterways have been cleaned to government standards.
Stephen, Wuori, president of Enbridge pipeline operations, insists the company has “generally dealt with what happened in a positive way.”
“We fulfilled our commitments to the people, we bought a number of homes in the area where there was concerns about the property value [and] cleaned up the river,” Wuori said.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admits it sill doesn’t know exactly how much oil is still in the river, some of it having sunk to the bottom in the months after the accident.
It took mere minutes for CTV News staff to dig up clumps of a tar-like substance in the river, which smelled of oil and floated to the surface of the water.
That’s no surprise to Michigan State representative Kate Segal.
“That’s the misconception, that the river is ‘clean’ and you can go back into it. The river is going to take decades, if not longer before there’s no sign of the oil anymore,” Segal said.
The Democratic representative says she’s still angry the spill ever happened, pointing to the fact that it went unnoticed by Enbridge for a full 17 hours, and that the company failed to fix the pipeline it knew was weakening years earlier.
She too is cautioning politicians in B.C. to demand only the best.
“Make sure the safety precautions are there because I have not seen the company stepping up and following their own safety guidelines.”
Enbridge says it has upgraded safety systems since the spill, and both the company and U.S. regulators say whatever oil remains in the Kalamazoo River should not pose a risk to the public.
A report from the U.S. Transportation Safety Board released earlier this year found Enbridge had failed to fix a defect in the pipeline that was discovered five years earlier, and accused the company of failing to respond adequately once the spill hit.
Two interveners have asked to submit the report as evidence to the joint review panel set up by Canada’s National Energy Board to assess Enbridge’s Northern Gateway proposal, but have been denied.
The panel says the individuals cannot speak directly to the report’s authenticity. While the report can be touched upon in oral discussions, it will not factor into the board’s decision.
With a report from CTV British Columbia’s Scott Roberts
