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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Response to latest U.S. oil spill 'inadequate'

Canadian company under shadow of BP disaster, vows massive cleanup

By: Lauren Krugel

Posted: 07/29/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

ANDRE J. JACKSON / DETROIT FREE PRESS Enlarge Image

A Canada Goose covered in oil makes its way along the Kalamazoo River on Tuesday.

Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge laboured Wednesday to contain an oil spill in the U.S. Midwest that brought it unwelcome attention in a world that for months followed the much larger BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"We, at Enbridge, are committing to clean up anything and everything that that oil has touched along the way," chief executive Pat Daniel told a news conference in Battle Creek, Mich., where he is overseeing the response to the three-million-litre spill.

But Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm blasted the cleanup efforts.

"The new resources that have been provided so far are wholly inadequate," Granholm told reporters Wednesday night, calling on the government for more help and blasting the resources being marshalled by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The Enbridge leak was smaller by many orders of magnitude than BP's massive blunder in the Gulf of Mexico, which spewed as much as 697 million litres of oil into the Gulf after a drilling rig exploded in April. But safety in the oil and gas industry has been top of mind in the United States ever since.

Calgary-based Enbridge has mobilized a cleanup effort, saying on Wednesday it had doubled to 300 the number of employees working on the spill that fouled a Michigan river and will set up twice as many barricades in nearby waterways to contain the leaked crude. Crews are starting to dig up the pipe in order to figure out what caused it to leak.

Enbridge has nearly 4.3 kilometres of boom set up throughout the Kalamazoo River and Morrow Lake in order to keep the oil from spreading. There is another 9.5 kilometres available, said Steve Wuori, Enbridge's executive vice-president of liquids pipelines.

Granholm warned of a "tragedy of historic proportions" if the oil reaches Lake Michigan -- still roughly 130 kilometres away from where oil has been seen -- as a state official who conducted a flyover reported oil had spread past a key point in the river upstream of Kalamazoo and was entering a PCB-laden Superfund site.

Research by the Polaris Institute, an Ottawa-based activist group, found Enbridge has been responsible for 610 leaks between 1999 and 2008, which amounted to a total of 21 million litres spilled in that time frame.

Meanwhile, crews took another step toward readying the relief well expected to finally kill the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher 100 days after the rig explosion, removing a plug that had been popped in before last week's tropical storm. They also said a temporary cap on the busted well is holding firm.

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 29, 2010 A9

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