Increasing amount of Tar Sands oil coming into Great Lakes

I live in Battle Creek, Michigan, just a few miles downstream from the largest (~1 million gallons) tar sands oil disaster ever spilled on American soil.

Enbridge Energy was responsible for this spill in 2011, and they have been cleaning it up for the past four years. They tried to walk away from the job claiming it was complete last year, but the EPA called them back to continue efforts to remove the heavy oil sludge that had settled to the river bottom.

Info about this spill and clean-up here.

Enbridge has just received approval to almost double the amount of tar sands oil flowing through their pipeline that terminates in Superior, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Superior.

Info on this approval and how it was obtained is here.

A larger problem with the mining and transport of this oil product -- beyond the fact that is much more difficult and detrimental to our environment to refine than oil from other sources -- is that Canada is allowing the destruction of their boreal forests 
to reach these oil sands.

The boreal forests are one of the largest natural carbon dioxide "sinks" in the world. These temperate forests constantly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen.

For more info on this, watch this TED Talk here. 

I fear that we will reach a point where the cascade of environmental destruction will be irreversible. Where the change in our atmosphere will reach a tipping point and all of our efforts to backpedal will be pointless.

This latest move by the State Department to approve this increase in flow of tar sands oil into the Great Lakes is a bad decision even if there is never a spill into the Great Lakes.

If there is a large spill, 

then the decision may well be catastrophic.

It is one thing to clean up a river (it takes years and costs about a billion dollars -- details here), but how would one restore the Great Lakes once a million gallons of tar sands oil -- or more --  corrupts the largest fresh water system in the world?

The Worst Oil Spill in the History of the Great Lakes

The EPA now estimates that 1 million gallons of crude oil have been released from the ruptured Enbridge Energy pipeline. Much of that oil has made its way into the Kalamazoo River.














I traveled further downstream from the spill today. The efforts to boom and skim the oil are underway at several points on the river.

The first two photos are on the river in Galesburg, 20 miles downstream from the spill. The sheen was light here, but still evident.




The photo to the left shows the power plant on Morrow Lake. There is a dam here and officials were hopeful that this barrier along with booms could be used to contain the oil.

In Comstock, just downstream from this dam, I saw a light sheen on the edges of the water where it had pooled in the shallows.

Below is video I shot today.

Oil Spill in West Michigan Heading Toward Lake Michigan

The overpowering smell of oil on the river is a much stronger warning than the signs which are posted for miles along the Kalamazoo River. I stopped at three points along the river for maybe 15 minutes total, and came away with a fierce headache.















This river flows through the center of Battle Creek (where I live), then through the towns of Galesburg, Kalamazoo, Plainwell, and Allegan. Then, finally, between the cities of Douglas and Saugatuck before joining LAKE MICHIGAN. There are many wetlands along the way and the river harbors much wildlife. I've kayaked stretches of this river and have seen deer, turtles, blue heron, trout, and muskrat.

Estimates of the amount of oil have been raised to one million gallons. Why was the oil allowed to gush for hours before the flow in the pipeline was shut off? We're still waiting for an answer from Enbridge Energy.

The last photo here is of the Ceresco Dam in Marshall. The EPA is using a Coast Guard helicopter to survey the extent of the spill. This is just a mile or two from origin of the spill. The second photo shows how the crude oil is gathering in the vegetation.

Watch the video below for a closer look at the spill.