INTRO: It’s day 5 of the clean up effort near Battle Creek. The leak in the broken pipeline might not have continued past Monday. But crude oil is still flowing in the Kalamazoo River. Locals are sad and angry even though the pipeline company president says he’ll take full responsibility. Michigan Now’s Chris McCarus reports.
Jim Susag was amongst the volunteers who saved an oil drenched duck in Battle Creek. Normally, Susag works on radiators and says Enbridge Energy Partners failed in the early stages of the spill.
“I mean you detect a loss of pressure or your flow drops. Don’t you hit cut off valves and send somebody out to investigate so you maybe have 20,000 gallons instead of a million leaking? It makes sense to me. Inexcusable I think.”
In a hotel down the street yesterday afternoon, Enbridge held a news conference. Vice President Steve Wuori said his company was using all its resources.
“When there is oil on the river as we’ve had right now the response has to be full out and ramping up very rapidly and that does not change with the volume of oil that is calculated to be out. It’s based on the physical conditions that the oil has moved into.”
Battle Creek is about 35 miles downstream from where the spill happened near Marshall. Wuori said 220 people are skimming the oil and pumping it into tanker trucks. The Enbridge president said most of the oil has been removed. But yesterday, the the Kalamazoo River near Battle Creek smelled like gasoline. The plumes of colors on the surface exploded and faded like fireworks in the sky.