By Todd A. Heywood, Michigan Messenger, November 9, 2010
Agency, company deny cover up, say remaining oil is expected
BATTLE CREEK — As the 106th day of the Enbridge Energy oil spill came to a close, residents gathered to hear the fifth community update from the Environmental Protection Agency about the clean up efforts.
The meeting came as citizen activists have been slamming Enbridge and the EPA, alleging a cover up is under way.
“No. Absolutely not,” said Mark Durno, the deputy incident commander for EPA on the Enbridge spill when asked if there was a cover up. “If there is any inappropriate activity going on, we’re not aware of it.”
“That is a 100 percent lie,” counters former cleanup worker John Bolenbaugh. “I have proved over and over again that they have cleared sites that I have found oil. Lots of oil! Just the site from my videos today was cleared for restoration a month ago. And no workers have worked there on any clean up since the last day I worked there. And it is full of oil.”
Bolenbaugh arrived at the community event with a gas powered hedge trimmer he said he found in the river Monday, and a bottle of oil polluted river water. He placed the hedge trimmer on the stage of the presentation area, and began to talk to the audience, before EPA Region 5 Director Susan Hedman cut him off and asked him to take his seat. He spent the remainder of the EPA presentation at the back of the room with a Battle Creek police officer beside him.
Bolenbaugh was fired by a cleanup contractor — he says for blowing the whistle on poor clean up practices — and has set out to document substantial amounts of oil up and down the Kalamazoo River and the Talmadge Creek. The two waterways were filled with oil in July when Enbridge’s Lakehead Pipeline 6B ruptured, spewing an estimate one million gallons of thick tar sands crude oil into the Talmadge. The oil made its way down the Kalamazoo River some 37 miles, before it was halted at the mouth of Morrow Lake in Kalamazoo county.
The EPA’s Durno says that he understands the frustration voiced by Bolenbaugh and other community members.
“I think some of it is confusion. They are hearing us say there is remarkable progress that we have made during this response, but then we are saying there is still oil in the environment,” Durno said. “We’ve tried to be clear up front, that the bulk of the oil is going to be cleaned up quickly. We gave Enbridge very aggressive orders to do a very aggressive cleanup and they have. We knew there was going to be a massive assessment effort to determine what the real scope of the continued oil contamination is in the environment.”
During the EPA community briefing, Durno informed an estimated 150 people about the status of the cleanup. During that presentation he announced that Enbridge has recovered 750,000 gallons of oil from the river clean up. Enbridge says the spill was not one million gallons, as the EPA estimates, but closer to 819,000 gallons. The company, working with as many as 2,500 workers, has removed millions of gallons of oil/water mixture from the river, as well as tons of oil-soaked soil and plants. There are now 500 workers wrapping up work on the river for the season. That includes decontaminating thousands of feet of boom that was deployed throughout the river over the last 106 days.
But this is not the first time this clean up has been marred with controversy. In August, Michigan Messenger reported that undocumented workers were being forced to work 100 hour weeks in unsafe working conditions. The day the story broke on Messenger, the contractor — Hallmark Industrial of Texas — was fired. That night, Hallmark packed the workers onto charter buses and headed back to Texas.
Two days later, the Chambers County Texas Sheriff Department was called to a scene in Whinnie Texas. There they found two charter buses off loading people. Officers detained 59 people, and 42 were found to be undocumented workers. Sheriff officials confirmed the workers had been driven from Battle Creek and the cleanup by Hallmark Industrial.
Enbridge claimed that it had reviewed the hiring documents of the Hallmark Industrial workers, and “as far as they could tell it was legitimate.”
Shortly after Messenger broke that story, additional workers came forward and shared stories of being directed to hide oil on islands in the river. At the time, Durno said EPA had determined to leave oil in some locations, while other areas would be cleaned up immediately.
On Monday, Durno said the EPA takes the oil on the river very seriously. Durno says he is aware of Bolenbaugh’s videos, but has not had a chance to review them.
“Every time people have reported information to us that suggests there is contamination somewhere there shouldn’t be — or that’s been covered up — we ask for specific location and we will investigate,” Durno said. “Give us a mile point on the river; we’ll investigate it and we’ll let you know if it is one of our known operation maintenance areas. If it’s not, we’ll get it in the program. If it’s on land there might be some subsurface investigation that needs to be done, if there is validity to these claims [of hidden oil]. But every issue that has been brought up we take seriously and we will address.”
Durno says the videos are unlikely to reveal anything the agency is unaware of.
“We expect to see submerged oil. We’ve seen submerged oil and we have done the first pass in cleaning up of the submerged oil with aeration techniques. In the future, we may have to take on some other techniques to get some of these areas done. Some of these areas we may not be able to, just because of the sensitive ecology,” Durno said. “We know it’s there. I don’t need to see the videos to know it’s there. I showed some pictures of oil that is in the environment yesterday.”
