Environmental groups urge regulations on 'tar sands' crude oil type that spilled into Kalamazoo River
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Chris Killian | Special to the Kalamazoo Gazette
BATTLE CREEK — Sometime this year, Congress will begin work to reauthorize funding to monitor and regulate the nation's 2.3-million mile network of hazardous liquids pipelines.
Several environmental groups want legislators to make distinctions in the bill between traditional crude oil and Canadian tar sands crude oil, a dirtier, heavier crude and the type that spewed from an Enbridge Energy Partners LP pipeline near Marshall into the Kalamazoo River last July in one of the largest oil spills in Midwest history.
Currently, the two types of oil are treated the same under federal regulations.
About 40 people attended a public forum Monday at the Burnham Brook Community Center in Battle Creek to discuss a new report from the National Wildlife Federation that raises concerns about how tar sands crude — a growing percentage of the nation's crude consumption portfolio — interacts with the aging pipeline infrastructure in the U.S. and the environment.
Tar sands crude has to be diluted with chemicals to thin it for transport. The resulting "diluted bitumen" is highly corrosive, acidic and potentially unstable, which environmental groups say increases the risk to pipelines.
"Tar sands crude is a fact of life. We just don't know how it's going to react with the environment," said Robert Whitesides, a member of the Kalamazoo River Watershed Council and presenter at the forum. "The Marshall spill gives us an opportunity to find out."
Mark Durno, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's deputy incident commander for the ongoing spill response and clean-up, said the EPA didn't ask Enbridge at the time whether oil spilling from its pipeline 6B was tar sands crude, but that it didn't effect how the agency responded to the catastrophe.
Durno said private groundwater well monitoring and air monitoring over the past several months has shown no levels of contamination from oil but that testing will continue, as will cleanup work this upcoming spring and summer. He said it's unlikely that public-use advisories for river will be lifted in 2011.
"It doesn't seem like local agencies are planning on lifting those advisories anytime soon," he said.
The Michigan Department of Community Health performed a survey last summer of residents in the spill area. Sixty percent of the nearly 500 people surveyed said they experienced health problems.
Susan Connolly, of Marshall, and Deb Miller, of Ceresco, called at Monday's forum for a long-term public health study to be performed to gauge how the spill affected residents along the river, several of whom complained of burning eyes, upper respiratory problems and other symptoms. But the two women said that when they contacted the MDCH to inquire about such a long-term study, they were told the agency lacked funding, Connolly said.
Miller, who said she experienced health problems, said the state should look to Enbridge. "We need the support of agencies to make Enbridge pay for it (a study)," she said. "No one's done a study on how this oil affects people. Now is the perfect opportunity.
"And as much as I'm concerned about what people experienced last summer, I'm more concerned about 20 years from now."
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2011/03/environmental_grou...
