U.S. EPA gets up to $13M for Michigan river cleanup

MARSHALL, Mich. - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Monday the Obama Administration has authorized it to spend up to $13 million to cover the government's immediate costs in responding to the spill of more than 1 million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River.

Federal officials also said Monday that the environmental disaster will take months to clean up and investigate.

News of the incident attracted a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 1,000 people to a town hall meeting Monday night.

Earlier yesterday, Susan Hedman, the agency's Midwest regional administrator, opened a two-hour multiagency briefing by telling reporters the federal money was being provided up front only to address emergency needs. She said the government would seek reimbursement of all costs from Enbridge Inc., the Canadian company that owns the pipeline.

"We will be seeking recovery of every penny from the responsible party, Enbridge," Ms. Hedman said.

Anne Rowan, U.S. EPA spokesman, said the agency may request more money if it appears that $13 million won't be enough.

The federal EPA had previously been given a $2 million budget for emergency-response costs associated with the incident, which occurred sometime in the two days July 25 and July 26 along one of the river's tributaries, Talmadge Creek.

The broken pipeline has spurred an all-out response from multiple state and federal agencies, with some experts being flown in from other parts of the country, in part because of concerns of oil reaching Lake Michigan. The Kalamazoo River flows into Lake Michigan.

Although the U.S. EPA has exercised its authority to take control of the scene, the investigation is being headed by the National Transportation and Safety Board.

Board officials Matt Nicholson and Bob Trainor told reporters yesterday they can now say with certainty that the pipeline experienced an unexplained pressure drop in the vicinity of the spill at 5:58 p.m. on July 25, two minutes after Enbridge began initiating a routine pipeline shutdown for planned maintenance.

But Mr. Trainor, chief of the board's pipeline and hazardous materials division, said it is not yet clear if the pressure drop was related to the planned shutdown or was a symptom of the ruptured pipe.

The investigation, still in its infancy stages, includes information from 22 interviews in the Marshall area and 16 more at Enbridge's command center in Edmonton, Alberta, he said.

Marshall Township firefighters were called to the scene the night of July 25. They had received a complaint of a possible natural-gas leak and did not see oil seeping into the marshy floodplain along the Talmadge, said Mr. Nicholson, the safety board's investigator in charge of the oil spill.

"We are not any closer to a cause," Mr. Nicholson said. "Once the pipe gets out of the ground, that will fill in a lot of gaps."

Officials plan to excavate a 140-foot section of pipeline at the spill site and send an undetermined length of it to an NTSB laboratory in Washington for metallurgical analysis. But even removing the ruptured pipeline is a job that probably is weeks away because of the danger of volatile chemicals at the scene and the health hazards they pose to workers. The task is complicated by the marshy terrain, which limits access on its own, Mr. Trainor said.

"We won't be getting into an analysis for some months from now," Mr. Trainor said. "We're not really even sure how large of a fracture we're dealing with."

The spill, although contained, continues to present enormous challenges, officials said.

"We're seeing a lot of sheen, especially on the upper 10 miles of the river," Mark Durno, the U.S. EPA's deputy incident commander, said. The sheen is broken up in many parts, depending on the flow and dynamics of the river. The federal EPA now is overseeing 37 containment sites along the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek and has 78,000 feet of boom deployed, with more than 200,000 additional feet of containment boom on standby in the event of severe storms, Mr. Durno said.

"There is still a lot of oil out there, especially in the initial breakpoint near Talmadge Creek," he said.

Many ducks, geese, turtles, and frogs have died because of the spill. The impact on fish has been minimal, but officials said they are expecting large numbers of fish to die as oil works its way through, robbing the water of oxygen.

Jim Rutherford, a public health officer for the Calhoun County health department, said municipal water wells that serve residents of the Marshall and Battle Creek areas continue to be monitored for contamination. No oil has shown up, but seepage could occur over several months.

Air quality within the vicinity of the spill continues to be monitored for cancer-causing benzene and other contaminants.

Sixty-one homes lie in an area where officials have encouraged, - but not required - residents to leave. Twenty-seven owners have declined; a few have not been located, Mr. Rutherford said. He said he issued a ban Sunday night on water use for agriculture and in residences within the evacuation zone.

Residents are discouraged from fishing, swimming, or boating in Talmadge Creek and some nearby portions of the Kalamazoo River, 1st Lt. Bonnie Kanicki Wilson of the Michigan State Police said.

Contact Tom Henry at:

thenry@theblade.com

or 419-724-6079.