Kalamazoo River pipeline rupture (2010)
In July 2010, Enbridge's Line 6B ruptures near Marshall, Michigan, spilling about twenty thousand barrels of diluted bitumen into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River: a clean-up of over a billion dollars.
On July 25, 2010, Enbridge's Line 6B, which carries diluted bitumen from Canada to the US Midwest, ruptures at a corrosion crack near Marshall, Michigan. The Edmonton control center reads the alarm as a gas bubble and restarts the pump twice: more than seventeen hours pass before a local gas utility worker reports the leak. About twenty thousand barrels flow into Talmadge Creek, then into the Kalamazoo River, over more than forty kilometers. Diluted bitumen sinks: under the surface it settles in sediments, which an ordinary crude spill does not do. The clean-up lasted years and topped a billion dollars, according to the operator's figures. The federal pipeline regulator, PHMSA, proposed a $3.7 million civil penalty in 2012, the largest in its history at that point. In 2016, the consent decree with the Justice Department and the EPA added a $61 million civil penalty under the Clean Water Act. For insurers, this loss sets the order of magnitude for river pollution near homes: cleaning costs, buying out houses, compensating residents. A pollution liability policy with a low limit is not enough, and pipeline operators have since raised their limits. Then there is the alarm: detection failed as much as the material did. Not to be confused with Colonial Pipeline, 2021, which was a cyberattack with no leak.
Textbook case: a pipeline operator has a pollution liability limit of 150 million dollars. A rupture of the Marshall type costs, at the 2010 order of magnitude, over a billion: insurance covers a seventh, and the group bears the rest on its balance sheet, hence the calls for higher limits.
Kalamazoo 2010, Enbridge Line 6B, Marshall Michigan oil spill, Kalamazoo River oil spill
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