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By Elizabeth McGowan and Lisa Song, InsideClimate News

Jun 26, 2012

On Sunday, July 25, 2010, Enbridge Line 6B ruptured near Marshall, Mich. and released more than one million gallons of Canadian diluted bitumen into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. Illustration by Catherine Mann for InsideClimate News. View the full map on page 2 of this story.




Something else was wrong, too.








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Despite the scope of the damage, the Enbridge spill hasn't attracted much national attention, perhaps because it occurred just 10 days after oil stopped spewing from BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, which had ruptured three months earlier. Early reports about the Enbridge spill also downplayed its seriousness. Just about everybody, including the EPA officials who rushed to Marshall, expected the mess to be cleaned up in a couple of months.

What the EPA didn't know then, however, was that 6B was carrying bitumen, the dirtiest, stickiest oil on the market.







"Submerged oil is what makes this thing more unique than even the Gulf of Mexico situation," Durno told InsideClimate News. "Yes, that was huge—but they knew the beast they were dealing with. This experience was brand new for us. It would have been brand new for anyone in the United States."


"Enbridge was caught off guard initially, much like all of us were," Rutherford said in an interview. "We just weren't ready for anything of this magnitude. … We didn't even know the nature of the type of crude."

Click on map to enlargeMap of the rupture site and the Kalamazoo River


Pipeline 6B was built in 1969 and is 293 miles long. It is part of Enbridge's 1,900-mile Lakehead system, which transports Canadian oil to major refining centers in the Great Lakes region, the Midwest and Ontario.


A map of line 6B

The federal agency responsible for regulating interstate pipelines is the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), a perennially underfunded and understaffed division of the U.S. Department of Transportation. For the most part the agency relies on pipeline operators to monitor their pipelines and self-report any problems. One of the biggest concerns is corrosion, which can lead to spills or leaks if the corroded areas aren't patched or replaced.


Records show that 6B had a history of corrosion problems.

In 2008, Enbridge identified 140 corrosion defects on 6B as serious enough to fall into the 180-day category. But the company repaired just 26 of them during that period.

In 2009, Enbridge self-reported a separate set of 250 defects to PHMSA. The company fixed only 35 of them within 180 days.

Instead of immediately addressing the 329 defects that now remained, Enbridge got a one-year extension from PHMSA by exercising its legal option to reduce pumping pressure on 6B while it decided whether to repair or replace the line.

A defect on 6B near John LaForge's house, where the pipeline eventually ruptured, didn't appear on any of the 180-day repair lists.

That defect, at mile marker 608, was detected at least three times before the pipeline ruptured, in 2005, 2007 and 2009, according to documents Enbridge filed with PHMSA over the years. But each time, Enbridge decided it wasn't significant enough to require repairs within 180 days.

Ten days before 6B ruptured, Enbridge applied to PHMSA for another extension. It asked for an additional two and a half years to decide whether 6B should be repaired or replaced.


On the same day Enbridge applied for that extension, Richard Adams, the company's vice president of U.S. operations, assured a congressional subcommittee on pipeline safety that Enbridge was well prepared for an emergency.

"Our response time from our control center can be almost instantaneous, and our large leaks are typically detected by our control center personnel," Adams told the lawmakers. "They can view that there is a change in the operating system, and there are provisions that, if there is uncertainty, they have to shut down within a period of time, and that would include the closing of automatic valves."

The emergency response plan the company keeps on file with PHMSA is more specific. It says a rupture on the Lakehead system would be detected within five minutes and the damaged segment closed in three minutes.



One minute later, a high-priority alarm sounded in the control room, indicating that pressure had dropped to zero near Marshall. Another alarm triggered Enbridge's safety system and automatically halted the pumps at Marshall. Over the next five minutes, three more high-priority alarms signaled pressure problems on the line. Then a sixth alarm sounded, signaling a discrepancy between the volume of oil entering and exiting the pipeline.

At first, the control room operators weren't particularly concerned, according to a control room timeline and other documents recently released by the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB. They thought a large bubble had formed between batches of crude, a problem that often resolves itself. They figured the bubble would last until they restarted the pipeline early Monday morning.

The operators were so confident of their diagnosis that when their 12-hour shift ended at 8 p.m. they didn't mention the six alarms to their replacements, according to the NTSB documents.

Back in Calhoun County, however, noxious odors were beginning to permeate the summer night. At 9:25 p.m. local residents started dialing 911. One complained about a "very, very, very strong odor, either natural gas or maybe crude oil." Another described a house "asphyxiated with the gas smell" and asked if it was safe. Firefighters and local utilities checked the area for gas leaks, but found nothing. A Michigan Gas technician reported that he smelled petroleum.

The 911 calls continued as Sunday slipped into Monday.


At approximately 5 a.m., they shut 6B down again.


"I guess there's two choices here, either consider it a leak or try it again?" the control center operations supervisor said.

"Just call it a false alarm," the analyst said.

As they prepared to restart the line for a second time, one of 6B's operators said he thought there was a leak. But others disagreed, and at 7:10 a.m., 6B's pumps kicked into gear again.


At 7:48 Monday morning—about the time Lorraine LaForge was telephoning John to tell him the smell near their house was even worse—the shift leader called for almost doubling pressure on 6B. But the extra power wasn't available, so they shut down the line again.


"Whatever, we're going home and will be off for a few days," one of them said. They left the control room a few minutes later.


The leak wasn't discovered until 11:17 a.m., when an employee for a Michigan utility company called Enbridge's emergency number with the bad news. Oil was pouring into Talmadge Creek, about three-quarters of a mile from the pump station, he said.


InsideClimate News asked Enbridge to answer a question that the NTSB timeline raises: If the company didn't know about the leak until 11:17 a.m., why had its workers gone to the LaForge residence at 10 a.m. and tested the air in the family's home?

A company spokesman said he couldn't answer that question, or any other question about the chronology of events, while the NTSB's investigation is ongoing.


Pipeline operators are required to report spills to the National Response Center in Washington, D.C. "at the earliest practical moment" following "discovery of a release." This notification is considered crucial to any cleanup response because the NRC alerts state and federal agencies to unfolding disasters.

Enbridge first tried to contact the NRC just after 1 p.m., according to the NTSB documents. The company had already alerted its own public affairs office in Houston about the spill 15 minutes earlier.

Because the NRC line was busy, Enbridge didn't get through until 1:33 p.m.—almost two hours after it had confirmed the spill and more than three hours after Enbridge workers urged the LaForges to leave their home. The company reported a spill of 819,000 gallons of oil.

Three minutes after Enbridge finished talking with the NRC, the center had contacted 16 agencies.


Everything reeked of petroleum. Residents were on edge.

Deb Miller was driving home from her event-planning job in Battle Creek that evening when she saw several hundred people clustered on 12 Mile Road bridge. The bridge across the Kalamazoo River is in the village of Ceresco, about five river miles west of John LaForge's home. It offers a dead-on view of the Ceresco Dam, a local landmark.

Miller and her husband, Ken, had raised their two daughters in Ken's childhood home, which sits just 300 feet below the dam. They had built a deck off the back of their nearby flooring and carpeting business so they could enjoy watching fish swimming just under the river's surface.



"We knew instantly by the smell and the color of the river that something had happened," Miller said, wrinkling her nose at the memory. "And whatever it was, it was huge."


Enbridge rushed workers to the creek as soon as the spill was confirmed. But even as they positioned absorbent boom on the water's surface and dug culverts to divert the oil, they suspected they wouldn't be able to stop it from surging into the river just a couple of miles away. Flooding from four days of heavy rain made the oil-soaked water almost impossible to contain.






The cleanup teams had two advantages as they planned their strategy. The break had occurred just minutes from Enbridge's maintenance facility in Marshall, so some cleanup equipment was immediately available. Marshall is also close to Interstates 94 and 69, so more apparatus could be trucked in quickly from Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Detroit and Chicago.




"It was heartbreaking," he said. "There wasn't much being said on that helicopter."

By the time Jim Rutherford, Calhoun County's public health officer, arrived that afternoon from his office in Battle Creek, the oil had overwhelmed the creek. Despite the best efforts of the cleanup crews, it was surging into the Kalamazoo River.

Rutherford, just two years into his job, was bewildered by what he saw. He and his staff were prepared to deal with tornadoes and other severe weather but they knew next to nothing about oil spills. Until that afternoon, Rutherford hadn't even known that an oil pipeline passed near Marshall.

"We were pressing Enbridge as to what their plans were," he said about those early chaotic hours at the command center. "They only had a middle manager there and he was like a deer in the headlights. Yes, EPA was there, but we really needed Enbridge to call the shots."

The officials had two questions to answer—fast.



Finding a definitive answer to the second question was more daunting.

Every type of crude oil, including diluted bitumen, is made up of hundreds of chemicals, and many of them evaporate into the air after a spill. Scientists don't fully understand how some of these chemicals affect humans. During a congressional hearing on the spill, Scott Masten, a scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, would testify that "the potential for human health effects exist. However, understanding and quantifying these effects requires further study. There has been relatively little long-term research into the human health effects from oil spills."


The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental organizations have long contended that dilbit contains more benzene than conventional oil, but it's hard to know whether that's true. Little research has been done on dilbit, and most of that work was conducted by the industry and is considered proprietary information.

Workers with the EPA and Enbridge joined Michigan health officials in using an assortment of hand-held monitors to check the air for benzene, a standard procedure at any big oil spill. Some types of monitors, which they usually had access to, weren't available that first day because they were still at the BP oil spill.



As Calhoun County's health director, Rutherford was responsible for making that decision. But he felt overwhelmed. Until now, his primary focus had been coordinating food inspections and school nurse programs for the county's 136,000 residents. His health department didn't have access to monitoring equipment. In fact, only one of his 70 employees is dedicated to emergency preparedness.

"People need to understand that at a local level, we're totally dependent on state and federal resources in a situation like this," he said recently. "That's a reality."

For help, Rutherford turned to the federal and state health experts, people he would later describe as his "superheroes." But they couldn't provide any easy answers because no federal benzene guidelines applied specifically to their particular crisis.


Another set of benzene guidelines, drawn up by a coalition of federal agencies, is usually used for workers dealing with a short-term emergency. Those guidelines say that people can be exposed to up to 200,000 ppb for eight hours without increasing the risk of long-term health effects.

The health experts who gathered in Marshall weren't exactly sure how long the benzene would linger, but their expertise told them it would be longer than eight hours but shorter than two weeks—and definitely less than a year. So what were they to do?



Late Monday Enbridge gave the EPA a Material Safety Data Sheet, or MSDS, a federally mandated document required for hazardous substances that are transported or used in a workplace. But the three-page MSDS didn't offer much guidance. Nowhere did it mention "bitumen" or "diluted bitumen" or "dilbit." The only clue that the oil in 6B might be different from conventional oil were references to "diluent" and "condensate," two terms that refer to the chemicals added to dilute the bitumen. But nobody seemed to recognize that the words indicated this was not ordinary crude.


Rutherford and the other health care experts considered everything they had seen and learned that day. They agreed that an evacuation wasn't needed—at least not yet.


"It was kind of numbing, like being in a dream," he said. "Were we ever going to be able to get a handle on this?"


Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect that BP's Macondo well was capped on July 15, 2010, ten days before the Enbridge spill occurred.