Remember Kalamazoo - 5 years later

Five years ago, a pipeline carrying crude oil from Canadian tar sands ruptured in Michigan, spilling over 1 million gallons into the Kalamazoo River in what would become the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history.

"The Kalamazoo River still isn't clean," Anthony Swift, director of NRDC's Canada Project, told OnEarth. "The EPA reached a point where additional cleanup might do more harm than good. Much of the river is still contaminated."

To Chris Wahmhoff, who grew up a mere 100 yards from the Kalamazoo River, the fifth anniversary... [is] just another step in the long fight to hold Enbridge accountable for the damage they caused. Wahmhoff remembers playing in the river nearly every day as a child — an avid kayaker, the river was an integral part of his life until the 2010 spill, when residents were told to stay away.

In 2012, Wahmhoff returned to the river alongside a former Enbridge employee, who told him about how the company had buried oil on the riverbanks. But he was shocked by what he saw when he finally returned to the river.

"I went to a river that I had been to every day of my life, and it was unrecognizable," he said. "It looked like a grave. There was no vegetation."

While at the river, Wahmhoff stepped into sand that should have been about 10 inches deep. Instead, he was swallowed by a quicksand-like substance that engulfed him to his waist. According to Wahmhoff, when his friends managed to pull him out of the sand, his leg was covered in black oil. Wahmhoff says that he threw up for three days straight, and developed a rash a month later. Now, in 2015, he has been diagnosed with a rare disease that he says is a product of his exposure to the bitumen from the oil spill.

"All of us on the ground, we definitely embrace the idea that we've been the canary in the coal mine," Wahmhoff said. "We want everyone to understand not just that there was an oil spill and not just that those chemicals make people sick, but that [oil companies] don't do a good job of protecting the community or informing the community about what dangers they face."

When the pipeline — an aging structure owned by Canadian oil company Enbridge Inc. — first ruptured, it was the middle of the night on July 25, 2010. It took more than 17 hours for Enbridge to cut off the pipeline's flow, a delayed response compounded by the company's dismissal of alarms as a malfunction and attempts to fix the problem by pumping more oil into the pipeline. By the time the pipeline had been shut off, more than 1 million gallons of tar sands crude oil had spilled into the Kalamazoo River, impacting nearly 40 miles of the river and 4,435 acres of shoreline.

The spill was especially devastating because of the nature of tar sands crude — a substance that OnEarth's Brian Palmer notes "looks more like dirt than conventional crude." To get tar sands crude to travel through pipelines, oil companies mix the substance with natural gas liquids to create something called diluted bitumen, or dilbit. When the tar sands crude leaked into the river, the natural gas liquids vaporized and drifted into nearby neighborhoods, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents who lived in the area. The tar sands bitumen, however, drifted to the bottom of the river. That made cleanup especially difficult, because most oil spill cleanup technology is meant to deal with surface-level oil, through skimmers and vacuums made to remove oil from the water's surface.

That technology was rendered essentially useless in the case of Kalamazoo, which was the first major pipeline disaster to involved diluted bitumen. Enbridge was forced to dredge the river to clean it, a costly and time consuming solution that proved not entirely effective. Even five years after the spill, environmentalists claim that tar sand bitumen remains in parts of the river.

[Climate Progress]

Tar Sands Pipeline spill clean up finally complete - 4 years and $1 billion later

More than four years after an oil leak was discovered July 26, 2010 near Marshall, the Canadian pipeline company Enbridge has completed its cleanup and restoration of the Kalamazoo River.' [MLive] 

Enbridge Inc. was required to clean up the mess from a pipeline leak that sent an estimated 843,000 gallons of crude oil into Talmadge Creek and the river, the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, "Enbridge Energy Partners LLP (Enbridge) reported a 30-inch pipeline ruptured on Monday, July 26, 2010, near Marshall, Michigan. The release, estimated at 843,000 gallons, entered Talmadge Creek and flowed into the Kalamazoo River, a Lake Michigan tributary. Heavy rains caused the river to overtop existing dams and carried oil 35 miles downstream on the Kalamazoo River."

The EPA  mobilized an Incident Management Team made up of federal, state and local agencies and the spill was contained approximately 80 river miles from Lake Michigan.

Four years later, all sections of the river are once again open for public use, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Weekly Fish Report of Oct. 9.

Tar Sands Dilbit Disaster continues on Kalamazoo River

It was near Marshall that an aging oil pipeline burst on July 25, 2010 and spilled more than one million gallons of heavy Canadian crude oil into the Kalamazoo River. It was the largest inland oil pipeline spill in U.S. history, and its effects can still be seen today in the river and in the lives of the people who live near it. 

While cleanup continues three years after the Michigan oil spill, the U.S. EPA is still concerned that 180,000 gallons of submerged oil, some of which is moving towards a Superfund site, is a threat to the river and to people living nearby.

The Kalamazoo accident was the first major pipeline spill involving diluted bitumen, or dilbit, the same type of oil that will be carried by the Keystone XL pipeline if the Obama administration approves the project.

Bitumen is a tar-like substance that must be diluted with liquid chemicals before it can flow through pipelines. When the Michigan pipeline split open, the chemicals slowly evaporated and the bitumen began sinking to the river bottom.

The spill turned the river and little Talmadge Creek black with oil. The air was so rank with toxic stink that emergency hotlines were flooded with calls from people sickened by the fumes. 

It was a chaotic scene of evacuations, armies of cleanup crews, stunned officials and anxious neighbors. It took the pipeline's owner, Enbridge, Inc., 17 hours to shut it down. The oil flowed past a historic dam near Miller's home and nearly 40 miles downriver.

[Inside Climate News]

If you think pipelines and tar sands are safe, consider this...

Exxon Pegasus Pipeline - Mayflower, Arkansas - Tar Sands Oil Spill - Source Area

Consider that we've recently had 9 pipeline leaks, explosions, tar sands spills or accidents  (including Canada) 

1) ExxonMobil's Pegasus Pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas 

2) Enbridge's Norman Wells Pipeline in the Northwest Territories 

3) Suncor, Alberta Tar Sands leaking into the Athabasca River

4) Lansing Board of Water & Light in the Lansing Grand River in Michigan 

5) Canadian Pacific Rail train derailment in western Minnesota 

6) Canadian Pacific Rail train derailment in northwestern Ontario 

7) DCP Midstream natural gas compressor explosion in Guthrie Oklahoma 

8) S and S Energy in Damascus Ohio, oil tanker and gas well explosion 

9) Shell Pipeline in West Texas.

The Pegasus pipeline spilled over 10,000 gallons of tar sands oil and forced the evacuation of an entire suburban neighborhood. [EPA photos gallery]

Exxon is now controlling the airspace over the spill and has threatened reporters with arrest for criminal trespass for going to the command center to speak with EPA officials who are coordinating the spill clean up. 

Do we really want to allow a foreign corporation to build the Keystone XL pipeline that would be ten times larger than the Pegasus pipeline? 

Here is a quick and easy way you can submit your thoughts to the State Department (via 350.org). Secretary of State John Kerry will be making the decision to approve or reject the Keystone XL pipeline in the near future. 

Here is another view on the safety of pipelines from the NY Times. 

Two recent oil pipeline spills have prompted new criticism from opponents of the proposed Keystone XL project, while raising more questions about whether the federal government is adequately monitoring the nation's vast labyrinth of pipelines.

An ExxonMobil pipeline ruptured March 29th, spilling more than 10,000 barrels of tar sands crude in an Arkansas town. On Tuesday April 2nd, vacuum trucks and crews were still working to clean up the accident, which the Environmental Protection Agency called a "major spill." 

The spill appears to be the largest accident involving heavy crude since an Enbridge Energy pipeline spill in 2010 that dumped more than 840,000 gallons near Marshall, Mich., soiling a 39-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River.

The pipeline that burst during the Enbridge tar sands oil spill in Michigan - July 2010

The safety records of both the Exxon and Chevron pipelines have been under scrutiny in recent years. Last week, the pipeline agency proposed imposing a $1.7 million fine on Exxon Mobil over a 2011 spill that dumped an estimated 63,000 gallons of oil in the Yellowstone River in Montana.

The Arkansas spill followed an accident in Utah on March 18 in which a Chevron pipeline leaked more than 25,000 gallons in a wetlands area about 50 miles from Salt Lake City. The Chevron spill was the third in three years in Utah, prompting Gov. Gary R. Herbert to sharply criticize the pipeline agency at a recent news conference. "Obviously, they have not done a very good job of overseeing the pipes that travel between our states," he said.