Three Years Later, Panhandle Leaders Say Gulf Restoration Could Be Economic Boon

Anchor-handling tugboats battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. U.S. Coast Guard photo.

For more information on the state of the Gulf, check out the report Restoring A Degraded Gulf of Mexico.

Three Years Later: BP Still Needs to be Held Accountable

April 18-Three years ago, on April 20, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and killed 11 workers. Two days later, the rig sank. Before BP finally capped the well, months later, 206 million gallons of oil had been released along with huge quantities of hydrocarbon gases.

Larry Schweiger, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said today:

“Nearly three years later, the impacts of the Gulf oil disaster continue to unfold. Dolphins and sea turtles are still dying in high numbers. Just this month scientists announced the spill’s underwater oil plume caused a massive die-off of creatures at the base of the Gulf’s food web. It’s clear that we will not know the full fallout from the disaster for years.

“BP needs to be held fully accountable. The outcome of the ongoing trial must send an unmistakable signal to every oil company that cutting corners on safety is simply not a smart thing to do.

For more on the Gulf 3 year mark, check out the blog Deepwater Horizon: The Disaster that Keeps on Harming.

And now here are highlights from NWF in the news:

The Inca city of Machu Picchu

Many human hands have touched this architectural and spiritual marvel, and the wildlife impacts are apparent. The once-wild Alpaca are now domesticated. The Andean condors revered by the Inca and signified in the ruins are rarely spotted crossing the valley dividing Machu Picchu from its neighboring peak Huayna Picchu.

Yet the natural beauty endures.

The city sits almost at the summit of the mountain and is surrounded on three sides by the Urubamba River. The Quechua word for water is “Yaku.” Civilization has often flourished near rivers because they serve as a source of necessary freshwater, abundant fish, and aqueous superhighways for commerce and transportation. For the Inca and indigenous people who still inhabit the region, Yaku is life.

On the 24th anniversary of the Exxon-Valdez oil disaster, it’s disheartening that 11,500 square miles of the Amazon rainforest beneath these peaks will be auctioned off for oil production. Indigenous groups in the region rely on one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world to provide food, water, shelter, and medicines. The Achua and Quechua people reside in the river basins straddling Ecuador and Peru beneath the Andes Mountains that form the headwaters of the Amazon River.

These people shoulder the most acute cost of inherently dangerous oil exploration in this pristine setting — and they don’t feel the Ecuadorean government is taking their concerns seriously. According to Narcisa Machienta, a leader in the Achua community, “they have not consulted us…they don’t have our permission to exploit our land.”

Unfortunately, the Achua and Quechua know this from experience. Occidental Petroleum began production in the Pastaza River basin in the 1970s. Since that time, Sixto Shapiama of the Quechua community says there have been “constant spills…[T]he sediment at the bottom of the river is completely contaminated.”

Most recently, Argentine oil giant Pluspetrol has fouled the land and waters of the Quechua and Achua.

Urubamba River with hydroelectric generation.

Likewise, BP shareholders received dividend checks even as Gulf fishermen struggled to sell their catch.

In the United States, environmental laws attempt to shift some of the actual impact of oil production to the industry. As a result, BP is liable for response costs, all quantifiable damages, and civil and criminal penalties for its role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Department of Justice is pursuing claims against BP in federal court. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has an opportunity to ensure an oil company accounts for the real cost of its business.

The Peruvian government does too. The good news is that the Environment Ministry is finally taking that opportunity: In January, Pluspetrol was issued $11 million in fines for contamination at Peru’s largest crude oil field. Just this week, the Ministry declared the region an environmental state of emergency, ordered Pluspetrol and Occidental to clean up their mess, and set standards to limit soil contamination.

Let’s hope for the sake of the Quechua, the Achua, the Amazon, the condor, clean water, and future generations of honeymooners that the Ecuadorean government follows suit. And for the sake of Floridians, Louisianans, Americans, the Gulf of Mexico, sea turtles, and our children, let’s hope Judge Barbier does too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s difficult to quantify the harm in an environmental disaster. The Gulf is enormous and oil gushed from over a mile below the surface of the ocean. Because water and wildlife move, it would be near-impossible to find every bit of damage. Researchers found evidence of Deepwater Horizon oil in pelican eggs in Minnesota last year! To compound matters, the impacts are far-reaching into parts of the ecosystem that scientists don’t know much about. For instance, a substantial amount of the oil moved southwest of the Macondo well and settled into a deep underwater canyon.

But for multinational oil companies like BP, the profits are obvious, and they are high.

BP’s 2012 annual report indicates that Chief Executive Bob Dudley, who spoke at the CERAWeek Energy Industry conference yesterday about just about everything but trial, made $2.67 million last year. In the three years since the spill, BP has netted close to $40 billion, even after covering the cost to cap the well, run ubiquitous “our beaches are open” commercials, pay individual claims and pay the largest corporate criminal penalty by the Department of Justice.

Anchor-handling tugboats battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. U.S. Coast Guard photo.

The law that governs oil spills is clear: since profits from offshore drilling are so high and the consequences are so dangerous, unsafe drillers who spill must compensate for all damage and face penalties. This helps discourage putting profits over safety.

Unbelievably, on the day of our panel, the Washington Post ran an editorial arguing that BP should not face severe penalties. The editorial posed the question, “How much is too much for BP?” In what must be a tagline meant for an April Fool’s Day piece, the editorial continued, “A bill anywhere near that large is impossible to justify.” This is precisely why polluters engage in willful blindness to legal requirements: environmental laws are viewed as somehow less legitimate than tax evasion, racketeering, or labor laws. But crime is crime.

Testimony from the trial shows that this multi-billion dollar corporation had an “every dollar counts” mentality that led them to take egregious safety risks to cut costs, resulting in the loss of eleven lives and over 172 million gallons of crude oil spilled in one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Misplaced sympathy for BP’s liability is akin to taking pity on Ponzi schemers facing punitive damages for their crimes. BP made calculated business decisions to take dangerous shortcuts in search of profit. The only way to prevent such behavior in the future is to balance the scales of justice so that the reward no longer justifies the risk.

Almost three years after the spill began, the Gulf’s dolphins are still dying in high numbers. Ask the Department of Justice to hold BP fully accountable so we can restore the Gulf of Mexico!

Striped dolphins swim through BP oil, April 2012 (NOAA’s National Ocean Service)

We’ll take a detailed walk through that history later. But first, the latest from the trial, where a senior BP official admitted on the stand yesterday that BP couldn’t be bothered to gather all available evidence during its internal investigation:

A BP team investigating the company’s Macondo well blowout that led to the explosion and fire that sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in April 2010 never received the results of tests of a light cement used to plug the well from cement contractor Halliburton, a senior BP official leading the investigation said Wednesday. Mark Bly, BP’s executive vice president for safety and operational risk, confirmed during testimony Wednesday afternoon that senior BP attorneys repeatedly demanded the test results and samples of the cement used on the rig from Halliburton, but that they were not made available to BP investigators before publication of the company’s investigative report that bears Bly’s name. [...]

Asked if BP and other investigative teams should have received those results, Bly said, “Yeah, I think people should share information that can help us learn about accidents.”

THIS is the brilliant, no-expense-spared legal strategy that BP has been warning Gulf oil disaster victims about? Look out, out-of-work fishermen – if you don’t take our lowball settlement, we’ll go on the witness stand and tell everyone how forehead-smackingly inadequate & lazy our own internal investigation was!

Legal experts are questioning the sanity of whoever at BP decided to go to trial:

Early witnesses have hammered BP for an “every dollar counts” culture that put profits over safety in the Gulf.

Legal experts familiar with the case expressed surprised that it ever got to trial, and said negative attention from the trial could hinder the company’s efforts to recover from the disaster. [...]

“A day or so more of this bloodbath and BP will get weak in the knees, raise its current $16 billion offer to $18 billion and settle with the U.S.,” [Loyola University College of Law professor Blaine] LeCesne said Wednesday.

As the National Wildlife Federation’s John Kostyack has laid out in detail, even that $18 billion figure could be much lower than BP’s true liability.

Did you expect BP, one of the world’s largest and most profitable corporations, to make better decisions? Why would BP start making good decisions now?

In the very first public relations class I ever took, we were given Tylenol’s response to the 1982 tampering attack as the best way to confront crisis. Put public safety first. Be completely honest and transparent. Do all that right, and winning back the public trust will be worth more than a $100 million ad campagin.

Instead, at literally every step of the way, BP has put profits over people and wildlife, rash action over data collection, and obstruction over transparency:

• Gulf safety plans were copied & pasted from other plans in completely different parts of the planet
• BP officials ignored warning signs that might have averted the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 workers and gushed over 200 million gallons of oil and other hydrocarbons into the Gulf of Mexico
• BP officials gave the public oil gusher flow rates that were as much as 53 times lower than the true rate
• As hundreds of dolphins and sea turtles and thousands of birds died in the oil disaster zone, BP officials worked to hide the dead from reporters
• Even before the gusher was capped, BP CEO Tony Hayward whined “I’d like my life back,” then jetted off to a yacht race
• BP’s oiled wildlife hotline was at times comically inefficient
• Instead of reaching a fair civil settlement, BP used its media connections to try to get let off the hook from a full payment for its mistakes

Dozens of Gulf activists rally outside BP trial, February 2013

Take Action

Since the first days of the Gulf oil disaster, the National Wildlife Federation has been fighting for justice for the Gulf’s people and wildlife. “The Gulf of Mexico is more than just a place where oil companies make enormous profits—it’s a public jewel where our children swim, where wildlife live, and where we get the food we eat,” NWF President & CEO Larry Schweiger said this week.

Please take a moment right now to ask U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to hold BP fully accountable for the reckless damage it caused to the Gulf and the wildlife and communities that depend on it.

Photo credit: flickr / thepugfather

Yesterday, BP agreed to pay a record criminal fine for the Gulf oil spill, but vowed to vigorously contest the charges it is facing under federal environmental law. Money from these penalties will go to restoring the Gulf.

BP Must be Held Accountable

Dolphins in one heavily oiled section of the Louisiana coast are suffering and even dying from a variety of symptoms–including anemia, low blood sugar, and lung disease–that suggest exposure to oil.

But media reports indicate that BP might be attempting to negotiate an agreement with the Department of Justice to pay less than half of what the company could face at trial for its violations of the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act.

Speak up for Dolphins

The Department of Justice and BP have been in intense negotiations and could announce an agreement at any time.

BP’s fines need to be large enough to restore the Gulf of Mexico for dolphins and other wildlife—and to send a clear message that America holds reckless polluters fully accountable.

Gulf dolphins need us to help ensure the Department of Justice holds BP fully accountable for restoring Gulf habitat–please add your voice today!

New Report: Midwest Auto and Manufacturing Revival Takes Region Beyond “Drill Baby Drill”, Anchors Job Growth, Innovation Nationwide

October 19 - As voters contemplate who will occupy the White House and Congress in the years ahead, the Center for the Next Generation and the Center for American Progress released “Regional Energy, National Solutions,” a new report that argues that the United States needs a real strategy to achieve lasting energy and economic security – one that builds on the powerful assets of each region of the country and invests in multiple forms of energy and fuel.

“In the Midwest, American workers and the automotive industry are proving every day that America has what it takes to rebuild our economy, lead globally, and combat climate change at the same time,” said Zoe Lipman, Senior Manager New Energy Solutions, at the National Wildlife Federation, who authored the Midwest chapter of the Report.

New Report: Southeast Leadership In Next Generation Electricity Powers Region Beyond “Drill Baby Drill”, Spurs Jobs, Businesses, Innovation

October 19 - As voters contemplate who will occupy the White House and Congress in the years ahead, the Center for the Next Generation and the Center for American Progress released “Regional Energy, National Solutions,” a new report that argues that the United States needs a real strategy to achieve lasting energy and economic security – one that builds on the powerful assets of each region of the country and invests in multiple forms of energy and fuel.

“Jobs being built across the Southeast today show that America has what it takes to meet the challenge of climate change, thrive in a resource-constrained global economy, and create lasting economic growth at home,” said Zoe Lipman, Senior Manager New Energy Solutions at the National Wildlife Federation, who authored the Southeast chapter of the report.

New Report Details Major Pipeline Threat to Great Lakes

October 18 – Today the National Wildlife Federation released a report warning of a pipeline hazard located beneath the Straits of Mackinac. Submerged in the waters, where  Lakes Michigan and Huron meet, more than 20 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas fluids are pumped every day through aging pipelines operated by Enbridge Energy—the Canadian company responsible for the worst inland oil disaster in U.S. history. The report comes as Enbridge faces increasing scrutiny for safety lapses both in the U.S. and Canada.

Sunken Hazard: Aging oil pipelines beneath the Straits of Mackinac, an ever-present threat to the Great Lakes, documents how an oil spill from the pipeline—commonly referred to as Line 5—would have devastating consequences for people, fish and wildlife and the economy.

Fair, Robust Resolution Needed for Gulf Oil Disaster

October 18 - To avoid a trial for the Gulf oil disaster, recent reports suggest BP has offered amounts ranging from $16 to $18 billion—an inadequate amount that is less than half of the total liability to repair what is the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

“BP should not be let off the hook with a low settlement and allowed to shortchange the Gulf,” said John Kostyack, vice president of wildlife conservation at the National Wildlife Federation. “A low settlement leaves the Gulf of Mexico more vulnerable to further deterioration from natural and manmade disasters, as well as demonstrates to polluters that they will not be held fully accountable.”

The Clean Water Act Turns 40

October 17 – Forty years ago, in a show of bipartisan support, Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972. Hunters and anglers have supported strong Clean Water Act protections, understanding that clean water and healthy wetlands and streams are essential to healthy fish and wildlife. This year, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act and the historic results this keystone legislation has achieved: healthier water to drink; cleaner streams, rivers, and lakes in which to swim, fish, and play; and dramatically lower rates of natural wetland loss.

NRPA and National Wildlife Federation Join Forces on Goal to Connect 10 Million More Kids to Nature

October 16 - The National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) has joined with National Wildlife Federation (NWF) in its unprecedented goal to get 10 million more kids to spend more time outdoors over the next three years. Working together, NRPA and NWF will combat the growing trend of “indoor childhood” and lack of “green time” among our nation’s youth. This partnership was announced today at the NRPA Annual Congress and Exposition. Public park and recreation departments in communities across the country will play a major role in accomplishing this vital goal.

Research shows children are spending long hours indoors using electronic media yet they spend only mere minutes a day in unstructured outdoor play. This is affecting the health and well-being of children and is quickly causing a generation of kids who are becoming less healthy and who are disconnected from the natural world around them.

The Greenforce Initiative Links Employers and Community Colleges to Meet Growing Need for Sustainability Skills

October 15 - The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and Jobs for the Future (JFF) have launched a new phase of the Greenforce Initiative, a multi-year effort to help community colleges expand economic opportunity as the United States moves toward a more environmentally sustainable economy.

Through a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, NWF and JFF are building networks of employers and community college leaders to collaborate on helping students develop job-ready skills through better sustainability and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) training, which also helps address the skills gaps that exist in these employment fields.

And here are highlights from NWF in the News:

NWF Staff Photo

Now, I am not a lawyer, merely a wildlife advocate who spent weeks in the Gulf both during the disaster and in the aftermath to document its impacts on wildlife and communities. But I really feel the need to clarify here, and while I don’t want to start another word war between Jerry Seinfeld and The New York Times, I have a few questions.

BP? The same BP that, along with rig owner Transocean and contractor Halliburton, the presidential oil spill commission found ignored critical warning signs and failed to take precautions that might have averted the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 workers and gushed over 200 million gallons of oil and other hydrocarbons into the Gulf of Mexico?

The BP responsible for a spill zone where more than 8,000 birds, turtles and dolphins were found dead in the first six months, with the dead never found potentially 50 times that number and with dolphins still dying in higher numbers two years into the disaster? Those guys?

If we’re talking about the oil company that reportedly tried to keep media away from seeing dead dolphins, I’m pretty sure that was BP, right?

The same BP that gave public estimates that underestimated the spill rate by 53 times, then held back video of the gushing wellhead that let independent experts almost instantly give the public a more accurate spill rate than weeks of BP and government cover-ups?

Striped dolphins swim through BP oil, April 2012 (NOAA’s National Ocean Service)

The BP that was incredibly efficient at hiring boat captains (leading to their conspicuous silence) but comically inept at setting up an oiled wildlife hotline?

Stop me if I’m wrong, but this was the company that decided to conduct a giant experiment by using an unprecedented 1.1 million gallons of chemical dispersant to bury oil out of sight at the bottom of the sea floor, where much of it remains? My spider sense is telling me BP.

The BP who banks billions in profits each quarter but warns it’s gearing up to wage a long legal battle if asked to pay a penny more than BP thinks is “fair and reasonable”?

And if you go into Louisiana marshes today or look out on the Gulf’s surface, there’s still a good chance you’ll see oil belonging to, and I’m just talking a wild guess here, but I’m gonna say BP?

That BP? They think they can push us into giving them a sweetheart settlement deal? Really?

The National Wildlife Federation has written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to hold BP fully accountable for the damage they did to the Gulf Coast’s wildlife, communities and ecosystems. It’s important that we get a settlement that’s not only just and fair, but timely – after Alaska’s Exxon Valdez disaster, Exxon Mobil dragged out its legal battle with victims for decades.

Take Action

Attorney General Holder needs to know that we have his back as he takes on BP and its army of lawyers. Please take a moment right now to ask Attorney General Holder not to let BP off the hook.

Are you as outraged as I am? Then don’t stop there. Ask your friends and family to take action – copy and paste the link into an email or IM, or use the social media buttons on this page to “like” this post on Facebook and tweet it if you’re a Twitterer.

Shell’s Kulluk Oil Rig, credit Tom Doyle/Flickr

Shell’s rig is not simply another rig.  It is the pioneer, intended to open a new frontier and convert an unspoiled aquatic wilderness into the next big oil rush. These waters are vital habitat for an abundance of wildlife such as ringed seals, as well as whales that travel the world’s oceans and birds that migrate across North America every year.

Shell Oil:  A Large Spill is Not “Reasonably Foreseeable.”

As a team of oil spill experts warned in a thorough report of Arctic ocean drilling the risks are being minimized and ignored now just as they have been ignored before, as we witnessed so tragically with BP’s ultra deepwater operations. In the Gulf, we had the largest spill response infrastructure in the country to support a dense concentration of long term operations.  In the remote Arctic waters, there is nothing except rough seas and sea ice that can close waters to recovery operations for long periods of time.  Shell is bringing up a single spill response barge.  It’s hard enough to cast a crab pot in these waters, let alone contain millions of barrels of spilled oil.  NWF’s Peter Lafontaine noted last summer this statement by US Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp:

“If the company fails, if the response plan fails, the federal government must in some way be able to back it up with some resources. We had plenty of resources, from bases to communication systems to helicopters, in the Gulf of Mexico. And if this were to happen off the North Slope of Alaska, we’d have nothing.”

So we are crossing our fingers and trusting that Shell can mobilize the resources to handle a spill.  At least they are taking the risk seriously, right?  Well, no:

“A large oil spill, such as a crude release from a blowout, is extremely rare and not
considered a reasonably foreseeable impact.” — Shell Alaska Chukchi Sea Exploration Plan

Sound familiar?  Here’s what BP said in their Gulf drilling plans prior to the Deepwater Horizon blowout:

“In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill, it is unlikely to
have an impact based on the industry-wide standards for using proven equipment
and technology for such responses.” –Oil Spill Response Plan for BP Deepwater Horizon Drilling

Should we trust an oil company to begin drilling in these unspoiled waters when their plans are based on the premise that a large oil spill isn’t “reasonably forseeable?” No, we know better.  But they received a green light, anyway.

Does Wildlife Matter to Government Drilling Regulators?

Bearded Seal, via Kerry Ritz/Flickr

No evidence?!  Here are some of BOEMRE’s conclusions from their own environmental assessment of what could happen in a major spill (one that significantly underestimates the potential for a long-running blow-out like we saw in the Gulf):

Assuming that all young ringed and bearded seals exposed to the oil died because of absorption (through the skin), inhalation, and/or ingestion of toxic hydrocarbons in the oil, this loss could take these marine mammal populations more than one to two generations to recover Shell (p. 131-2).

Polar bears exposed to petroleum hydrocarbons through direct contact or by ingesting oiled prey would probably not survive (p. 132)

In lagoon habitats, long-tailed duck densities suggest that when large concentrations of molting individuals are present, tens of thousands could be contacted by spilled oil. This would constitute a substantial loss to the regional population. Notable losses would also be experienced by post-breeding common eiders concentrated near barrier islands and in lagoons. A spill …would be expected to contact several other species present in substantial numbers, including the king eider, scoters, northern pintail, Pacific loon, and glaucous gull. (p. 130-1)

Oil Disasters: An Acceptable Cost of Doing Business?

Everyone knows where this story ends up…it really comes down to how often and how big the spills will be off Alaska’s northern shores, and how badly wildlife is impacted.  But the risks of a wildlife disaster are all an acceptable cost of doing business for oil companies.  After all, BP pocketed $24 billion in profits in 2011.  Deepwater Horizon was a financial blip for them, but the damages to marine life will be long-lasting.

Deny Deny Deny

A 2011 Keystone XL protest outside the White House gates got the attention of top White House officials and helped derail the Keystone XL project, at least for now. The industry is adapting to avoid another Keystone controversy. Image from treehugger.com.

Their departing CEO, Patrick Daniel, showed no remorse and gave no apologies for one of the biggest fossil fuel disasters in North American history. Instead, he sounded frustrated last week, saying he wished the tar sands pipeline business hadn’t become so controversial. Good riddance Mr. Daniel.

Last spring, his company announced a plan to reverse the direction of a pipeline called line 9, so that it could carry crude east rather than west. No big deal, right? What Enbridge didn’t do was show all its cards. The real plan is to send dirty tar sands oil across several Great Lakes and New England states to Portland, Maine, for transfer by ship to refineries or for export. The project, called Trailbreaker, was floated two years ago, and then abandoned when the recession set in.

When local groups in New England announced opposition a few weeks back to piping tar sands near precious rivers in the area, Enbridge reached up its sleeve for the denial card. A spokesman for Enbridge told the Associated Press, “We have been absolutely clear on the fact that the company is not pursuing the Trailbreaker Project.”

That’s not credible. As NWFs Curtis Fisher retorted in the AP article, Enbridge denied it was looking at reversing Line 9, until they went ahead and announced they wanted to reverse Line 9. In fact, the company is salivating at the prospect of moving (by their 2008 estimate) 150,000 barrels of tar sludge a day to Portland.

“We’re pretty excited about [Trailbreaker],” an oil executive said in a 2008 presentation,”because it provides capacity on an as-needed basis, and it involves existing assets so it can be completed at low cost and on a quick turnaround.”

So what’s the truth? Enbridge appears to be playing a dangerous game of denial, putting the pieces in place for a tar sands route to New England, while denying the once and future Trailbreaker (or something by a different name) is happening. Elephant in the room, what elephant?

Divide and Conquer

Meanwhile, another pipeline giant, TransCanada, has split the 2,000 mile Keystone XL into two, in an attempt to move the project piecemeal and shrink the scope of the State Department’s environmental review. Wildlife Promise recently referred to this as divide and conquer:

[A]after Keystone XL was rejected the first time, TransCanada decided to split off the “Gulf Coast segment” of the pipeline, which stretches through Oklahoma and Texas, as a stand-alone project. Because this route doesn’t cross the US border, it avoided the need for the Presidential Permit and the review it entails.

That particular tactic paid off for TransCanada last month, as the Army Corps of engineers  gave a green light to construction of XL in Oklahoma and Texas. The oil execs at TransCanada probably had some high-fives last month as well when the State Department announced its new environmental review will ignore the southern segment of Keystone XL.

[Click here to take action and stop latest attempt to resurrect Keystone XL.]

Must History Repeat?

In the summer of 2010, over a million gallons of tar sands oil spilled when an Enbridge  pipeline ruptured near Marshall, Michigan, contaminating  the Kalamazoo River. Families were driven from their homes and wildlife suffered and died. Responding to the spill, Michigan Congressman Fred Upton said, “Each and every one of us is all too familiar with the devastation wrought by the BP Gulf disaster and now we have a nightmare here in our own backyard. The mistakes and missteps that sabotaged the response and cleanup in the Gulf cannot happen here in southwest Michigan.”

A wonderful sentiment to ride out the news cycle, but Rep.Upton went on to champion Keystone XL, even as the mess persisted in his back yard.

The Environmental Protection Agency ordered Enbridge to clean up the mess, but it is still not cleaned up. Workers are still struggling to remove residual crude oil and are increasingly resigned to the possibility that it may never be cleaned. According EPA’s website, after the spill 39 miles of the river system were closed to public access. By April 17, 2012, three miles–three—had been reopened. Other segments may reopen this year, says EPA, if it is safe.

Accidents in the Trailbreaker pipeline may be more likely because it’s so old. One section is 52 years old, and other large section dates to 1975. A spill from this pipeline could sully rivers, lakes and bays. At risk would be cherished places like Lake Ontario, the Saint Lawrence River, the Connecticut River, the Androscoggin River, Sebago Lake and Casco Bay.

Can We Afford to Trust Enbridge?

A 2007 Enbridge pipeline explosion in Minnesota, pictured here, killed two and spewed oil, fire and smoke into surrounding communities.

Just recently, we learned from media reports that Enbridge has under-estimated the risk of a tar sands spill along its Northern Gateway Project across western Canada, basically ignoring their dismal record in Michigan.

A former insurance CEO, Robyn Allan, concluded that Enbridge does not have “adequate insurance coverage or the corporate structure to cover a multi-billion dollar spill,” reported Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee.

‘There is no reason to believe Enbridge would be directly responsible for the cost of any spill based on the limited partnership structure. This structure allows profits to flow to Enbridge, but from what I have seen in the documents, not spill liabilities,’ explains Allan.”

Allan also suggested that Enbridge only minimally understands how the heavy crude oil behaves. It usually sinks to the bottom of a river and is harder to clean up than other fuels.

Allan added that the “company suffers from a corporate culture that places growth as priority above operational safety.”  That offers little reassurance to New Englanders. That was made evident when media recently reported that even as the Kalamazoo spill was happening, Enbridge employees, hundreds of miles away had one priority: get the oil flowing. Rather than check for a spill, they attempted to restart the pipeline, not once, but twice.

If Enbridge’s misadventures weren’t so heartbreaking it would be hilarious. Maybe we should call it “Heartbreaker,” not “Trailbreaker.”

[Note: special thanks to NWFs Peter LaFontaine for advice and editing in drafting this post.]

American White Pelicans in Louisiana's Barataria Bay, March 2012 (NWF staff photo)

Researchers for the state Department of Natural Resources have found evidence of petroleum compounds and the chemical used to clean up the oil in the eggs of pelicans nesting in Minnesota.

Scientists are looking for pollutants on a western Minnesota lake that is home to the largest colony of American White Pelicans in North America. About 34,000 adult pelicans will raise some 17,000 chicks this year on islands in Marsh Lake.

What’s most eye-catching is the high percentage of eggs showing petroleum:

Petroleum compounds were present in 90 percent of the first batch of eggs tested. Nearly 80 percent of the eggs contained the chemical dispersant used in the gulf.

“This high percentage really surprised me,” said Carroll Henderson, the DNR’s non-game Wildlife Program supervisor.

Henderson cautions that the results are still too preliminary to draw any conclusions as there are no tests of eggs before the spill to compare them to. But he said the results raise a lot of questions.

“While many more tests are needed, this is not good news,” says Doug Inkley, senior scientist with the National Wildlife Federation. “Instead of quickly breaking down, oil and dispersant could be entering the food chain, persisting and being passed on to the next generation.”

To be clear, we don’t know if the petroleum found in the pelican eggs is tied to the BP oil spill. However, the National Wildlife Federation continues to find pervasive oil in coastal Louisiana marshes in key wildlife habitat.