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Enbridge needs to step up to plate on slow response in Michigan spill

Open letter to Michele Perret, Enbridge manager of community relations. On Aug. 24, you made a presentation to the Smithers town council regarding the Michigan oil spill from an Enbridge pipeline, which ruptured there in July.

Open letter to Michele Perret, Enbridge manager of community relations.

On Aug. 24, you made a presentation to the Smithers town council regarding the Michigan oil spill from an Enbridge pipeline, which ruptured there in July. The spill, described as the worst oil spill in the American midwest history, leakedmore than three million litres of tar sand crude oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River.

You told council that Enbridge's response to the spill was "immediate," which created quite some reaction in the shocked audience. While the Michigan governor had publicly complained of Enbridge's "anemic" responseto the spill, the Congressional hearing on the disaster was presented this week with a report by the house transportation and infrastructure committee, which showed that an abrupt pressure drop was noticed along Line 6B about 6 p.m. July 25. Shortly after, local residents were calling 911, reporting a "bad" odour, possibly natural gas. Meanwhile, Enbridge control officials in Edmonton believed the problem was "a column separation" - a separation that sometimes occurs in the flow of oil as it moves through the pipeline.

An analyst advised the column separation could clear itself when the line was restarted - as scheduled - at 4 a.m. the following morning. But when the line was restarted, alarms kept going off, indicating a flow imbalance in the line. Believing it might clear itself, officials let the line run until 5:03 a.m., when it was shut down again.

Finally, the decision was made to restart it again at 7:10 a.m. and it ran until sometime after 7:46 a.m., as alarms showing an imbalance in the line continued to go off.

It is only on the following day at 10 a.m. that an Enbridge technician went to the pipeline's pump station there and verified low pressure readings - but the technician saw no leak, being some three-quarters a mile away from the rupture in the line. Meanwhile, calls continued to come in to the dispatch centre.

Enbridge reported the spill at 1:29 p.m., more than 18 hours after the abrupt pressure drop the previous day...

I ask that you justify your presentation to council, describing falsely an "immediate" response and publish your reply in the press.

Maybe what you characterize as "immediate" was a series of poor analyses of the situations, wrong decisions which never took into consideration the 390 corrosion defects found on the line in 2008 and 2009, of which Enbridge chose to fix only 61.

Worse, company tests found evidence of potential problems at the location of the eventual leak near Battle Creek, Mich.

Ms. Perret, you have seriously misled council and the public. I look forward to seeing your explanations.

Josette Wier

Smithers