Rob Sandall's Blog

In 2010, many safety overlooks and missteps made by the Canadian oil company Enbridge regarding the security of their pipelines led to disaster. One pipeline in Michigan ruptured and unleashed over 800000 gallons of crude bitumen from the Athabasca Tar Sands into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. Oil was found over 35 miles downstream from the point of rupture, and the cleanup has been very costly and ongoing until recently. The NTSB deemed that the oil giant had knowledge of the security shortcomings over 5 years before Kalamazoo, but simply did nothing to rectify them. The final cleanup has been completed and Enbridge has been hit with a 3.7 million dollar fine for the work, the most expensive in US history. This begs the question: If Enbridge had known about this faulty pipeline 5 years in advance, wouldn’t it be cheaper to simply fix the problem than wait for a catastrophe? If Enbridge had been more ethical in their proceedings, this environmental scandal could’ve been avoided, and their reputation wouldn’t have suffered a massive blow. Hopefully Enbridge will have learned a lesson not to cut corners in their safety procedures, and will carry themselves in a more ethical manner in the future to prevent this from happening again.

Sources:

Klug, Fritz. “NTSB Report: Enbridge, Federal Regulators Missed Numerous Opportunities to Prevent or Lessen Impact of Kalamazoo River Oil Spill | MLive.com.” The Kalamazoo Gazette. N.p., 10 July 2012. Web. 12 Sept. 2012. <http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2012/07/enbridge_did_not.html>.

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