Help stop the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline

[The Situation]

After this report, allowing Enbridge to build this pipeline would be as stupid as allowing a convicted criminal to babysit your children. It doesn't matter how much the criminal claims to have changed and learned from their mistakes, its still a terrible idea to hire them.

Thomson: Report on Enbridge damning

Should have realized pipeline rupture but kept on pumping

By Graham Thomson, Edmonton Journal

There are moments reading the U.S. government's report on the 2010 Enbridge pipeline leak in Michigan where you want to toss the document across the room in frustration.

Moments where pipeline operators at the company's control centre in Edmonton can't seem to figure out why the pressure in the line keeps dropping no matter how much oil they pump in. It's dinner time on Sunday, July 25, and alarms are going off in the control room like fireworks. The pressure in the pipeline keeps dropping so operators add more oil to the line. They're pumping oil in at one end and not getting it out the other - and you want to yell at the report "Oh, for crying out loud, you've got a leak! Stop pumping oil into the line!"

At one point in the chain of events, an operator suggests that maybe they've got a leak or, then again, maybe they should just keep trying to get the pressure up by pumping in more oil. They declare the alarms to be false and when the possibility of a leak was raised again, one operator glibly replies, "Whatever, we're going home and will be off for a few days."

Pumping more oil to the line to get the pipeline flowing is like CN trying to clear a derailment by sending more trains speeding down the track.

This goes on page after page as the report documents how three separate shifts of operators failed to recognize what was going on for 17 hours, from when the pipeline ruptured to when operators finally shut down the pumps.

And they didn't shut them down because they figured out on their own they had a problem; on the contrary they had to be told by a gas company employee in Michigan who noticed the leak.

In the end, of the 3.8 million litres of crude oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River, more than 80 per cent was pumped into the line after the pipe had ruptured.

Reading the report, you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

There's plenty to cry about: the largest inland spill of oil in U.S. history that is costing more than $800 million to clean up. But there are also shake-your-head moments when you almost have to laugh out loud, moments that prompted Deborah Hersman, head of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, to compare Enbridge to a silent-film-era comedy troupe.

"Learning about Enbridge's poor handling of the rupture, you can't help but think of the Keystone Kops," said Hersman, whose organization wrote the damning report. "Why didn't they recognize what was happening? What took so long?"

And it wasn't just the failure of operators on July 25, 2010, that has Hersman scratching her head, it was Enbridge's failure as a company to properly maintain what it knew to be an aging pipeline: "Yet, for five years they did nothing to address the corrosion or cracking at the rupture site - and the problem festered."

You have to marvel at the clarity, the conviction and the courage of Hersman, who does not dull her rhetoric or pull her punches. She's as blunt with U.S. regulators as she is with Enbridge, placing part of the blame on the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration: "Delegating too much authority to the regulated to assess their own system risks and correct them is tantamount to the fox guarding the henhouse."

Enbridge has been reluctant to say much about the report, except to vaguely reassure us it has made improvements to its safety system. The only response more vague than the company's is that from Canadian officials, including Alberta's, who say they're studying the report.

There is a quiet glibness among Alberta officials that what happened in Michigan couldn't happen here, that our regulations are more stringent, that our regulators are more vigilant.

But that is to ignore the spill of 4.5 million litres of oil from a Plains Midstream pipeline in northern Alberta in 2011, a spill that was vastly underreported at the time compared to the Enbridge spill because it happened in a relatively remote area. Also, Albertans tend to take oil spills in stride as a price of doing business. We're so unconcerned about Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to the West Coast that a public meeting on Wednesday in Edmonton to review the project had to be cancelled because nobody registered to speak to it.

Public hearings by the federal Joint Review Panel in British Columbia, of course, have generated much more interest because many residents there see the proposed Enbridge pipeline as nothing but an environmental time bomb waiting to blow up in their backyard.

Enbridge argues that the Northern Gateway pipeline will be modern, state of the art and less prone to leaking than any pipeline ever built.

However, the pipeline will be run by people and, as the Michigan spill so graphically illustrated, people make mistakes.

Enbridge has to explain exactly and in great detail how it has improved its system of inspecting and operating its pipelines.

The governments of Alberta and Canada have to explain how regulators will keep an eye on the regulated.

Even that is probably not enough to convince British Columbians that the Northern Gateway pipeline is a good idea.

And their fears are not mere paranoia. You just have to read the report on Enbridge's spill in Michigan and pretend it happened in Kitimat, not Kalamazoo.

gthomson@edmontonjournal. com

© Copyright © The Edmonton Journal

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Thomson+Report+Enbridge+damning/6921349/story.html

[ronthecivil]

After this report, allowing Enbridge to build this pipeline would be as stupid as allowing a convicted criminal to babysit your children. It doesn't matter how much the criminal claims to have changed and learned from their mistakes, its still a terrible idea to hire them.

[Buttock]

Oh, it's pretty bad alright.

Simply require them to have an insurance policy in place to cover any spills as part of any agreement to let them cross our province. It seems reasonable given the risk.

Then the market can decide if the risk is reasonable and back it up with the dollars to make it right if they truly believe it.

Sounds like a reasonable compromise to me.

[sixwings]

I've seen this movie.

First of all, we are not likely talking about a slight increase in oil but a rather significant one. No new sources, no new refineries and any shake up in the middle east (inevitable) and prices will sky rocket.

You say you are willing to pay more and that you are at the poverty line. This usually plays out as - prices go up, the low income folks and their well organized machine cry foul against the wealthy, taxes go up and the low income folks get their oil subsidized.

I am not in favour of allowing tankers through the inside passage but open sea transport with double hulled tankers is, I believe, at least as safe and likely more so than off-shore drilling platforms like in NewFoundland, Guld of Mexico, North sea etc.

I don't like the fact that I live on a reservoir that flooded thousands of acres of prime valley bottom and wildlife habitat and I really don't like the power transmission lines crossing all the pristine wilderness here where I live (Kootenays) to carry power to the lower mainland. All of this has destroyed massive amounts of wildlife habitat so the folks in Vancouver can have cheap power. Maybe we should dismantle these dams and take down the power lines to save the environment and leave you guys to fend for yourselves? After all, if we're going to do this NIMBY thing, it should apply to everyone, right?

[sixwings]

Nothing new as far as I know. If you haven't heard, the Conservatives are rewriting the Fisheries Act to further help pave the way for this pipeline and to help other companies advance dirty projects.

This should work out well for all the fish.

I for one, can't wait to eat polluted diseased salmon lake trout as the salmon will be extinct.

[KoreanHockeyFan]

Oh, it's pretty bad alright.

Simply require them to have an insurance policy in place to cover any spills as part of any agreement to let them cross our province. It seems reasonable given the risk.

Then the market can decide if the risk is reasonable and back it up with the dollars to make it right if they truly believe it.

Sounds like a reasonable compromise to me.

[Alex the Great]

Over here on Haida Gwaii, everyone is against the pipeline.

Everyone.

[Fanuck]

How much of that 14B was from up north?

Are you suggesting that an oil spill up North will decrease tourism in the lower mainland?

[ubcanuck]

Sounds like alot of pens envy at Alberta resource base. thinking of you truculence.

Firstly, it is oil Sands not tar. Tar is a word added by those who earn a good living off fighting whatever they can raise more money on and who need to demonize. Secondly, Canada benefits from oil production in Alberta in so many ways that Mr. Mulcair does not want you to think about. I won't list because I suspect most of you understand.

Flame if you want, but I have found the old truth to continue to be true. "if you are not left leaning in your youth you have no heart. If you are still left leaning as an adult you have no brain."

[TOMapleLaughs]

My main issue isn't really the pipeline. It's the port. Pretty treacherous coastline. Never allowed a proper port before. Another exxon valdez seems inevitable.

Meanwhile, there are already pipelines going tVancouver and Seattle's relatively safe ports.

Economically, This project benefits only the oil industry. All other economic sectors will see no change or get worse. It esp. doesn't benefit BC. Yet it'll go ahead. Billions will be made here.