Introduction
The Kalamazoo River weaves through southwestern Michigan, passing through the town of Marshall, the city of Battle Creek, and a number of small communities in between before eventually discharging into Lake Michigan.1 Nicknamed “Cereal City,” Battle Creek is home to the world headquarters of the Kellogg Company and other cereal manufacturing facilities, and on most mornings a faint smell of sugary breakfast foods hangs in the air. However, on July 26, 2010, residents awoke to a thick, oil-like stench. Some had noticed noxious odours the night before, but local fire departments that initially responded could not identify the origin of the smell. It was not until the next afternoon that Enbridge officially reported to the US National Response Center that its Line 6B pipeline had ruptured into Talmadge Creek, a small stream just outside of Marshall that flows into the Kalamazoo River. Weeks later, residents discovered that it was diluted bitumen piped from the Alberta tar sands that was pouring into these waterways.
The story of the Kalamazoo River disaster can be told in many ways. On one hand, it is a tale of corporate greed and negligence, and of a profound lack of regulatory oversight. On the other hand, for local officials, the spill is a story of multiple agencies working together to manage a situation that they had never received training for, involving thousands of contracted response workers suddenly pouring into a small town, with lawsuits later flooding a county court. The spill also revealed the many environmental health problems that ensue when diluted bitumen spills into a freshwater ecosystem and people are exposed to contaminated air and water. The story is often told in numbers: over 1.1 million gallons of diluted bitumen spilled; thousands of animals affected; roughly 2,500 cleanup workers employed; and ongoing cleanup costs exceeding $1 billion US as of 2014. But such numbers fail to capture the full and ongoing impacts of this disaster, especially when corporate and government bodies decide what counts, what does not, and when to stop counting.
This chapter begins with an overview of the spill itself and the controversies that surrounded cleanup efforts before examining the uncertainties about the long-term health impacts associated with exposure to diluted bitumen and what this means for residents. I argue that gaps in knowledge about these health impacts and gaps in environmental and public health policies reinforced each other in significant ways in Michigan. These gaps have important implications for environmental justice in other areas through which the tar sands industry is trying to push new pipelines, as well as for toxic developments more broadly. I conclude by briefly examining how a crop of “accidental activists” has emerged along the Kalamazoo River, forming unexpected alliances with neighbours and standing up for their communities and the environment—part of the growing resistance to tar sands pipeline expansion occurring throughout North America.
The research for this chapter was conducted in Michigan in the summer of 2013 and included seventy-five interviews with key informants, such as affected residents, government officials, industry representatives, scientists, lawyers, environmental activists, and journalists, as well as numerous informal conversations. A major challenge in telling this story is that it is replete with uncertainties, some of which may only come to be understood over very long periods of time. Moreover, because affected communities have been unable to substantiate many visceral experiences of injustice with the kind of evidence that could lead to political and legal victories—as this evidence is often very costly and time consuming to produce—important questions about the impacts of the spill and response efforts to it remain unanswered. In the face of these kinds of uncertainties, this chapter poses questions about where the burden of proof should be located and what kinds of proof should be required. Thus, the Kalamazoo River spill illustrates how weak regulatory regimes coupled with limited community resources and scientific uncertainty can serve to insulate polluters after disasters.
The Spill
Enbridge’s Line 6B runs from Griffith, Indiana, to Sarnia, Ontario. It was installed in 1969 to service the company’s Lakehead System, which is a network of pipelines that begins in Alberta and passes through the midwestern United States to eventually reconnect to Enbridge’s Canadian network. Together, these pipelines have been transporting roughly two and a half million barrels per day (bpd) of various types of oil, with Line 6B having begun to carry tar sands bitumen in 1999.2
At the time of the spill, very few residents even knew Line 6B existed, much less that the diluted bitumen it carried was markedly different and more hazardous than conventional crude (as it contained 30 per cent condensate with numerous toxic chemicals, including benzene).3 In the days after the spill, Enbridge withheld this crucial detail and instead presented the agencies in charge of response with a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for generic crude oil,4 thereby implying this is what had spilled. This misperception lasted for weeks, until investigative reporting prompted Enbridge to provide the agencies leading the cleanup with the proper MSDS and Hazmat guidelines for the known safety hazards of exposure to the chemicals contained in diluted bitumen. If Enbridge had been candid from the outset, people living within one thousand feet of the river would likely have been immediately evacuated.5 But since public health officials based their decisions on the chemical properties of crude oil, they only suggested a voluntary evacuation four days after the spill for about fifty homes in certain areas where dangerous levels of benzene were detected.6
In the hot summer months following the spill, thousands of people were exposed to airborne toxins. Many of those living outside of the suggested evacuation zone chose to self-evacuate, and Enbridge reimbursed hotel bills for most evacuees who were persistent enough to demand it. However, for low-income inhabitants of Baker Estates, a riverside trailer park, retroactive compensation was simply not an option because they could not afford the expense of relocation out of their own pockets, and it took several days of lobbying before Enbridge agreed to pay upfront for hotel rooms for evacuees. Because of this, as a woman from Baker Estates explained it, “we ended up getting evacuated 10–13 days later. A lot of people didn’t get evacuated at all, even upriver. It took bringing the press in; it took making signs [that read] sick children, sick dogs, sick people.”7
The Kalamazoo River spill was the first time the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—the organization leading the cleanup efforts—had ever had to deal with a spill of diluted bitumen, and cleanup workers quickly discovered that removing diluted bitumen from freshwater is extremely difficult. “We all had this naïve assumption that this oil was going to float,” explained one official overseeing the cleanup.8 Instead, the condensate mostly evaporated into the air or dissolved into the water, while the bitumen slowly sank to the riverbed and mixed with moving sediments. As a result, the EPA and Enbridge had to develop new cleanup techniques to deal with submerged bitumen, which affected approximately sixty kilometres of the river.
In 2013, the EPA estimated that about 180,000 of the 1.1 million gallons of diluted bitumen spilled into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 remained in the aquatic ecosystem. The EPA ordered Enbridge to collect an additional 12,000 to 18,000 gallons by dredging parts of the river in late 2013, leaving an estimated 162,000 to 168,000 gallons of bitumen clinging to river sediment. This remaining bitumen is deemed “unrecoverable” in the short term, and it may only be collected over a period of many years with the use of sediment traps that will slowly catch it in the river’s natural depositional areas. The EPA cannot say with certainty when or if all of the bitumen will ever be removed from the river.9
Investigations conducted by the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) later revealed multiple organizational failures involving Enbridge and various federal regulators.10 For instance, internal Enbridge inspections disclosed 140 corrosion-related defects in Line 6B in 2008, and an additional 250 defects in 2009. Some defects were detected as early as 2004, yet most remained unaddressed at the time of the spill. Weak safety regulations at PHMSA meant that these necessary repairs in Line 6B went unenforced.
On the evening of July 25, 2010, multiple alarms about abnormal pressure in Line 6B were triggered in Enbridge’s control centre in Edmonton, though the company did not discover or report the spill for another seventeen hours. Instead, Line 6B was restarted twice, and it was during these attempts to restart the flow of the pipeline that 81 per cent of the diluted bitumen spilling into the river was released. Although the PHMSA cited Enbridge for twenty-four violations of US pipeline safety regulations, the fine levied was a mere $3.7 million.11 The NTSB’s thorough inquiry ultimately placed blame for the Kalamazoo River spill on a combination of Enbridge’s inadequate pipeline integrity management procedures, lack of public awareness programs, and deficient training of control centre staff, concluding that these problems together led to unchecked corrosion fatigue in Line 6B.12
Health, Science, and the Burdens of Proof
It is especially haunting to explore the Kalamazoo River with those who are familiar with its ecology, as they regularly point out patches of sky where there used to be a canopy of trees, or speak about particular species of flora and fauna that are nowhere to be seen. The extent of the ecological impacts of the spill is still unknown, although a team of federal, state, and tribal agencies are collaborating on a Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) and river restoration plans following regulations under the US Oil Protection Act. A number of people involved in the NRDA expressed dismay about a lack of cooperation from Enbridge.13
During my field trips with residents, it rarely took long to identify oil-saturated logs on the riverbanks or rings of oil that linger on tree trunks, and our attempts to wade into the water brought oil sheen to the surface and a toxic smell to the air. Nonetheless, at a quick glance, parts of the river still look quite beautiful. This is precisely what bothers many residents: it is as if a life-changing disaster has simply been swept under the rug, and forgotten.
Allegations of a cover-up have been circulating since August 2010, when a former employee of a company subcontracted by Enbridge to work on the spill alleged that cleanup workers had been ordered to bury bitumen rather than remove it. This worker and other observers have publicly released photo and video documentation that shows the extent of what they call a major cover-up. Residents and journalists I spoke with confirmed hearing that cleanup workers had received orders to hide rather than remove the bitumen.14 Others recounted seeing cleanup workers who “brought dirt in and mixed it up [with the bitumen] and just left it there,”15 though Enbridge and the EPA have dismissed these allegations.
The Kalamazoo River was reopened for public use in June of 2012, nearly two years after the spill,16 when the Michigan Department of Community Health concluded that contact with residual bitumen posed no significant health risks. This assessment has not gone uncontested, however, as many residents are suffering from new or aggravated medical problems. In the course of my research, I heard countless stories about health problems that residents experienced in the aftermath of the spill. Acute symptoms in the ensuing months included headaches, nausea, respiratory difficulties, and skin lesions. Worse, some residents (especially those with already weakened immune systems or underlying conditions) described the onset of more serious and long-lasting problems in the wake of the disaster, such as heart attacks, seizures, asthma, chronic colds, lung problems, kidney failure, and worsened cancers. These concerns were amplified after a petition for the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to fund a long-term health study was denied on the grounds that it would not provide useful information.17
In Baker Estates, the riverside trailer park noted earlier, at least fourteen people have died since the spill from illnesses that other residents confidently attribute to their exposures. Seven others living nearby have died from health problems that could be related to the ensuing toxicity. Many residents have also witnessed pets die from conditions that developed after the spill. One former resident of Baker Estates, who recently lost her husband and is herself very ill and undergoing chemotherapy, explained that she has “a quarter million dollars in hospital bills.” Yet, like many sick and disadvantaged park residents, she has endured a range of dismissive responses from both local government officials and more affluent members of society, who have assumed that her health conditions are unrelated to the spill and are instead a result of “poor lifestyle choices.”18
In low-income riverside communities like Baker Estates, the confluence of poverty, higher rates of existing health conditions before the spill, and an initial belief that Enbridge would do right by those adversely affected left residents simultaneously vulnerable to exposure and susceptible to manipulation. In the days after the spill, Enbridge employees offered some residents of Baker Estates air purifiers and a few hundred dollars in exchange for a signature on a form—which they later learned was a release waiver ensuring they would not take legal action against Enbridge in the future.19 Many of those who did not sign these waivers went on to join a mass action lawsuit against Enbridge in September 2010, hoping it would yield enough money to relocate and pay for medical bills.
However, most had no choice but to prematurely settle with Enbridge for a very small sum. As one resident who settled put it, “I was stuck in-between a rock and a hard place, and had nowhere else to go.”20 By the spring of 2013, a handful of residents had yet to receive their payment, but only a few members of the park were continuing to fight Enbridge in court. One woman who had undergone two surgeries since the spill and was persevering with the suit noted how wealthier communities upriver had generally had more success in court with Enbridge, asking simply, “Why is my life worth any less than theirs?”21
At the crux of the legal challenge for some residents is that, unlike cases of property damage and devaluation, it is extremely difficult to prove that newly diagnosed health problems or the aggravation of existing conditions are direct results of the spill. Survivors of the spill are thus left without recourse for obtaining compensation from Enbridge for medical or vet bills. While Enbridge purchased about 150 houses along the stretch of affected river, many of those who did not own property at the time of the spill have only been successful in obtaining a small amount of financial compensation from Enbridge, if any. Yet even for those who were compensated, there is no closure. Rather, a sense of uncertainty about future health problems and associated costs weighs on residents, who are now keenly aware that illnesses from toxic exposure can take years to appear. Moreover, they fear that the lack of knowledge about the links between oil spills and health means that lawsuits on the basis of speculative injury are unlikely to succeed. As in all too many cases of environmental injustice, the burden of proof has fallen on affected communities.
At the congressional hearing on the Kalamazoo River spill in September 2010, Scott Masten, a toxicologist with the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, testified that “there are hundreds, if not thousands of chemicals present in crude oil, and we have incomplete knowledge of the toxicity of many of them.”22 There have been very few studies into the human health impacts of oil spills, and most existing studies have focused on acute and psychological impacts. Recent assessments have called for further bio-monitoring of communities exposed to oil spills because of the known potential for DNA damage and endocrine effects.23 Further, there have been no studies about the particular impacts of spills of diluted bitumen, which is yet another reason many residents are astounded that no government agencies are investigating the long-term health impacts of the Kalamazoo River spill—the first major accident involving diluted bitumen in the US.
Along with the limited knowledge about the chronic health impacts from exposure to spilled oil, there is an absence of clear national guidelines for assessing whether evacuation is mandated after an oil spill. For instance, the US federal government provides dozens of different recommendations for maximum safe exposure to benzene—a chemical found in oil that is known to cause cancer and neurological problems at high exposure rates—but none of these are specific to oil spills in residential areas.24 Despite these gaps in knowledge and policy, it is important to recognize that similar symptoms have been observed in many communities affected by oil spills, according to Dr. Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist, author, and activist who has been studying the subject since the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Ott first visited Michigan in 2011 at the request of affected residents, and noted how she “was shocked at the similarity of the illnesses that were reported and documented by people” in Michigan to what she had seen in Alaska.25
After the Kalamazoo River spill, public health officials scrambled to grasp the extent of the potential health risks and respond accordingly. Appropriate resources were not always at hand. “All my detection equipment was in the Gulf shores,” explained Jim Rutherford, the director of the Calhoun County Health Department.26 The massive spill caused by the explosion of a British Petroleum (BP) oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico had occurred in April 2010, just a few months prior to the Kalamazoo River spill. The fact that cleanup efforts were still underway in the Gulf at the time of the disaster in Michigan proved significant. In addition to the BP disaster overshadowing the Kalamazoo River spill in the national press, this timing also meant that the majority of the country’s oil spill response capacity (e.g., workers, equipment, and air-monitoring tools) was concentrated in the Gulf and took days to arrive in Michigan.
“I had to base my decisions on science—not on emotion or just reaction,”27 Rutherford explained, as he recalled struggling for days to decide whether or not to issue a voluntary evacuation order of some areas affected by the spill. This is where undone science encounters public health decisions—and by extension people’s lives—in very damaging ways. I borrow the concept of “undone science” from Scott Frickel and colleagues to refer to “areas of research identified by social movements and other civil society organizations as having potentially broad social benefit that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored.”28 In the case of the Kalamazoo River spill, incomplete knowledge about the effects of exposure to toxins in oil was used by certain government and corporate parties—those same agencies that are called upon but decline to fund further research—as justification for inaction. Genuinely concerned public officials like Rutherford are thus constrained by their institutional surroundings when it comes to making crucial decisions, such as whether or not—and whom—to evacuate after a major spill.
Accidental Activists
What happens when communities no longer trust the information provided to them by agencies that claim to be looking out for their best interests, such as a state health department or the EPA? For some, including one resident I spoke with, there is a sense of hopelessness: “What are we going to do? We’re just the little people. That’s big business, right there. We can’t compete with them.”29 As one lawyer told me, Enbridge “fought tooth and nail” against residents’ requests for compensation and transparency.30 Struggling against Enbridge, especially when ill, has been extremely time consuming and exhausting for those residents who have not settled. For them, it has been immensely politicizing to realize that, as one resident put it, “the county failed us, the city failed us, the state failed us, the federal government failed us.”31
The Kalamazoo River spill and the ensuing corporate and government response has transformed many residents into self-described “accidental activists.” One man whose family was adversely affected by the spill and dismayed at the lack of support available explained: “I’ve never been considered what you call the proverbial ‘tree hugger.’ Never really fought for the environment. I mean [the spill] kind of opened my eyes a bit, and I thought, you know what, this is wrong.”32 Prompted by the injustices they experienced, some residents began organizing community meetings, speaking to local politicians, doing research, filing freedom of information requests, sharing their stories with news outlets and on social media, and conducting their own health and water column studies in disbelief of the results of those performed by the state.33
These accidental activists also began to connect with other oppositional struggles against the tar sands industry. For instance, some travelled to Washington, DC, to participate in the large national demonstrations against the Keystone XL pipeline, and others have begun building relationships with members of Indigenous communities in northern Alberta and in British Columbia, where many are fighting Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project. Some have also begun to educate themselves and others about a range of interlocking dynamics, such as: tar sands extraction, fracking, and other forms of dirty energy production; capitalism and the entanglements of governments and corporations; and the quest for sustainable energy options and alternative models of social organization. These growing connections between different communities and grassroots resistance to the expansion of tar sands infrastructure seems crucial to any prospects for environmental justice, in Michigan and elsewhere.
Line 6B Expansion and the Future of Tar Sands Resistance in Michigan
The impacts of the Kalamazoo River spill are still unfolding, and will be for years to come. In addition to a pervading sense of apprehension about the long-term human and ecological health impacts of the spill, there is also an air of mystery that hovers around riverside communities. For how long will toxic contamination persist? Has money changed hands, as many residents suspect, between Enbridge and local government officials, news reporters, doctors, or lawyers? Were threats made, either implicitly or explicitly? Have Enbridge’s generous donations to local organizations bought silence, or were these honest attempts to improve a dire situation? These questions, which preoccupy many residents, may never be definitively answered. But one thing these “accidental activists” are sure of is that they are in this fight for the long run.
In late September 2010—just a few months after the spill—PHMSA authorized Enbridge to restart the flow of the repaired Line 6B,34 and by 2013 Enbridge was granted permission from the Michigan Public Service Commission to replace the pipeline entirely and increase its capacity from 240,000 to 500,000 bpd by 2014.35 But some aggrieved landowners along the new Line 6B pipeline have resisted, and a flurry of direct actions by the Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands successfully halted construction on the new Enbridge Line 6B on four different days in the summer of 2013.36 In addition, some concerned landowners have organized events to educate communities along the pipeline route about their legal rights in dealing with Enbridge and the heightened risks associated with bitumen spills. As with the Kalamazoo River disaster, new solidarity is being forged in opposition to the new pipeline.
Enbridge’s plans for accessing US markets do not end with Line 6B. Between proposals for four new pipelines and expansions to eight existing pipelines underway, Enbridge is assembling a five-thousand-mile network throughout the US. The backbone of this network is the Alberta Clipper (Line 67) running from Alberta to Wisconsin, and if its expansion is approved, this alone could carry up to 880,000 bpd of diluted bitumen and other Canadian oil—even more than the proposed capacity of the notorious Keystone XL (830,000 bpd).37
There are, of course, many reasons to resist tar sands production long before this dirty oil is diluted and shipped through poorly maintained pipelines, and there are limitations to using case studies like the Kalamazoo River spill as tools for mobilizing against future pipelines. In particular, episodic disasters should not overshadow the ongoing devastation in those places where tar sands and other fossil fuels are produced and refined, and the damage this inflicts on the entire planet. Nevertheless, this spill does shed light on how the impacts of environmental disasters map onto patterns of social inequality, and can teach us something about how struggles over proof and reasonable doubt, situated knowledge and scientific expertise, and corporate accountability play out on the ground. Most of all, the Kalamazoo River spill illustrates that bitumen should never be pumped over rivers, forests, farms, or anywhere. Instead, it should be left in the ground.