by Peter Ewart l Opinion 250

On Sunday evening, July 25, 2010, residents of Marshall, a small town in the state of Michigan, began to notice a strong petroleum odour in the air, invading their properties and houses. They phoned 911, but to no avail as the mysterious, sickening stench grew stronger. By the next morning, residents saw that Talmadge Creek was completely clogged with a black goo that stained its banks and was seeping up into lawns. 

 

Fish were floating belly up, geese were covered in oil, and the leaves of creek-side foliage shimmered tarry black in the sunlight.

 

Worried residents gathered at a bridge downstream of a small dam on the Kalamazoo River, the air reeking of petroleum. Then they watched in horror as “an alarming brown mist … the shade of a dark chocolate malt” rose from the river water as it tumbled over the dam (1).

 

Many of these residents must have been thinking: What will be the emergency response to such a disaster to their community and how will this mess be cleaned up? For its part, Enbridge had been repeating the mantra for years that it “was well prepared for an emergency” and that its employees were “well-trained” in emergency response procedures. All of this, of course, has a lot of relevance to those of us in northern British Columbia where Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline is proposed to cross.

 

But what was the actual experience with the Kalamazoo River spill in Michigan? First of all, as in other spills and safety violations involving Enbridge, training of personnel was cited as one of the biggest shortcomings leading up to the disaster. However, after the spill actually happened, training came up again as a serious problem. In fact, Enbridge and the EPA actually sub-contracted out much of the emergency response work to “spillionaire” companies that specialize in making millions of dollars out of environmental disasters as happened with the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in 1989 (2).   

 

Did these “spillionaire” companies sub-contracted by Enbridge hire local Michigan workers, given that the unemployment rate was and still is very high in that state? Well, no they didn’t. Instead, they hired hundreds of non-union workers, many of them untrained, from other states offering them as little as $10 or $12 an hour. This gave rise to public anger. As Michigan Congressman pointed out at the time, “Enbridge needs to live up to the commitment it made to our community, be a good neighbour, and start hiring qualified Michigan workers to clean up the spill” (3). It was only after such criticism that some local workers began to be hired.

 

As it turned out, a number of these out-of-state workers were undocumented Mexican labourers. One of Enbridge’s sub-contractors, Hallmark, which is owned by “the son of a prominent former Democratic elected county official,” was said to have brought dozens of undocumented workers to the site (4). According to U.S. federal law, Enbridge had to conduct mandatory safety training with these clean-up workers, but it did so only in English which meant that many of these workers who only spoke Spanish would have had great difficulty in understanding the training (5).

 

These undocumented workers “were paid $800 a week to toil on the river for as many as 14 hours a day, seven days a week”. Their working conditions were terrible, as were safety standards. Some workers were “denied access to medical care and treatment under threat to their jobs” (5). Even their supervisors “did not have the proper credentials to be working on hazardous materials clean-up”. Photographs later emerged showing “workers covered in oil saturated mud and still clothed in contamination protection clothing consuming food and water,” as well as there was unclear separation between contaminated and uncontaminated zones.

 

As the Michigan Messenger has pointed out, Enbridge officials must have been aware of these working conditions. One of the clean-up workers testified that “the safety issues were no secret” as “supervisors on boats wearing hard hats emblazoned with the Enbridge logo regularly stopped and watched the undocumented workers as they worked on the oil-coated islands of the Kalamazoo River, ate food and drank water with oil covering their hands and faces and while still in suits designed to prevent contamination”. According to the worker, the reason why Enbridge didn’t pay attention to the safety violations was because “the undocumented workers acted like a ‘bulldozer’ when they arrived on an island. They were working harder than anyone else”(6).

 

This worker actually phoned in to the Enbridge Community Hotline to report the fact that there were undocumented workers involved with the clean-up who were working in unsafe conditions. The Enbridge official seemed to be unconcerned about these allegations, but very interested in finding out the worker’s identity. In any case, Enbridge did not follow up on the allegations. It was only a week later when the Michigan Messenger ran news stories about the scandal on its website and politicians got involved, that the sub-contractor Hallmark was actually fired. Enbridge subsequently denied knowing that the workers were undocumented or that conditions were unsafe.

 

And there were other disturbing issues about the clean-up. Workers with Garner Environmental, Enbridge’s main sub-contractor, reported that the company was “instructing those who work for them to cover up oil-soaked areas rather than clean them up.” These workers described that, when they were taken to an island in the river, they “would be directed to remove all the vegetation and bag it”. Once that was done, they “were directed to rake the area to make it appear as though all the oil had been removed,” as well as sprinkle soil and leaves on the contaminated spot to cover it up (7). Over several months, a similar pattern of allegations emerged from workers employed with other sub-contractors involved in the clean-up (8).

 

Will we ever know the full extent of what happened in this massive clean-up? There are some ongoing governmental and criminal investigations, but a problem exists for the public. Enbridge and others make much of their “transparency” and “community relations” and “trained personnel”. However, one of the things that many may not realize is that, when a spill happens, the territory around it becomes a “no go” zone which is off limits not only to the public, but also to the media and even sometimes elected officials. This “no go” zone is guarded by company security personnel and backed up by police with the mandate to arrest trespassers. In the case of the Kalamazoo spill, an instructor at the MSU School of Journalism in Michigan commented that there were “serious concerns about why the sheriff’s department is doing the bidding of a private corporation” (9).

 

So this happened in Kalamazoo where Enbridge security personnel stopped media from filming or even approaching the affected sites along wide sections of the river. But it happened also with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And it also happened recently in Alberta where a television station broadcast footage of its news crew being booted off the site of an oil spill.

 

Presumably, that would also be the situation if a large oil spill took place in northern BC along Enbridge’s proposed pipeline. The affected river, lake or piece of land would be cordoned off indefinitely, with access being denied to residents, whether First Nations or others, as well as the media.

 

This, of course, makes it much more difficult for the public to determine whether the company’s rhetoric is matched by reality, which, as has been discussed previously in this series, is an ongoing problem with Enbridge.