SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Responders Totally Unprepared for Tar Sands Spill in Great Lakes
Coast Guard, environmental activist echo warnings made last year that current response plans for heavy oils are inadequate
Sep 11, 2014
For those living in the Great Lakes region of the U.S., a warning re-issued in Michigan this week may provide a shuddering thought: authorities there say they are unprepared to deal with a heavy crude spill in the lakes.
Speaking Tuesday at the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority at an international forum on "sinking oils, known as Class V" (which includes tar sands), Rear Adm. Fred Midgette, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's District 9, said that responders, including the Coast Guard, were urgently trying to come up with a plan to deal with a potential heavy spill in Great Lakes' waters, the Detroit Free Press reports.
The Free Press adds:
Midgette said he was particularly concerned that response plans and organizations "are not capable of responding to heavy oil spills, particularly in open-water scenarios," in an Aug. 20 memo to the Coast Guard's Deputy Commandant for Operations.
On Wednesday at the Great Lakes Restoration Conference in Grand Rapids, Jerry Popiel, incident management advisor for the U.S. Coast Guard's Ninth District, made a similar warning about the potential of heavy crude traveling across the Great Lakes. "The piece we really struggle with is the recovery of heavy oils off the bottom in deep water," MLive.com reports him as saying.
Lyman Welch, a water quality program director with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, who spoke along with Popiel, said, "Look at the Kalamazoo example and what happened there," referring to the 2010 spill of tar sands crude from an Enbridge pipeline.
The Coast Guard outlined these problems in a 2013 report, stating in its Executive Summary: "Current methods are inadequate to find and recover submerged [class V] oils with responders having to reinvent the techniques on each occasion."
The Alliance for the Great Lakes issued a report last year as well which focused on the region's gaps in preparedness for tar sands spills. "The regulatory and response framework for petroleum shipping on the Great Lakes is not fully up to the task of protecting the lakes from spills today, and is certainly not an adequate starting point from which to consider the viability of tar sands crude shipment by vessel," the report stated.
These reiterated warnings come as Calumet Specialty Products Partners L.P. weighs shipping tar sands crude across the Great Lakes.
"We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg and only just beginning to understand the grave impacts these extreme energy projects are going to have on the Great Lakes," Maude Barlow, chairperson of watchdog group Council of Canadians, warned earlier this year. "If governments continue to allow projects like this, what are our lakes going to look like in 20 or 50 years?" she asked.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
For those living in the Great Lakes region of the U.S., a warning re-issued in Michigan this week may provide a shuddering thought: authorities there say they are unprepared to deal with a heavy crude spill in the lakes.
Speaking Tuesday at the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority at an international forum on "sinking oils, known as Class V" (which includes tar sands), Rear Adm. Fred Midgette, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's District 9, said that responders, including the Coast Guard, were urgently trying to come up with a plan to deal with a potential heavy spill in Great Lakes' waters, the Detroit Free Press reports.
The Free Press adds:
Midgette said he was particularly concerned that response plans and organizations "are not capable of responding to heavy oil spills, particularly in open-water scenarios," in an Aug. 20 memo to the Coast Guard's Deputy Commandant for Operations.
On Wednesday at the Great Lakes Restoration Conference in Grand Rapids, Jerry Popiel, incident management advisor for the U.S. Coast Guard's Ninth District, made a similar warning about the potential of heavy crude traveling across the Great Lakes. "The piece we really struggle with is the recovery of heavy oils off the bottom in deep water," MLive.com reports him as saying.
Lyman Welch, a water quality program director with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, who spoke along with Popiel, said, "Look at the Kalamazoo example and what happened there," referring to the 2010 spill of tar sands crude from an Enbridge pipeline.
The Coast Guard outlined these problems in a 2013 report, stating in its Executive Summary: "Current methods are inadequate to find and recover submerged [class V] oils with responders having to reinvent the techniques on each occasion."
The Alliance for the Great Lakes issued a report last year as well which focused on the region's gaps in preparedness for tar sands spills. "The regulatory and response framework for petroleum shipping on the Great Lakes is not fully up to the task of protecting the lakes from spills today, and is certainly not an adequate starting point from which to consider the viability of tar sands crude shipment by vessel," the report stated.
These reiterated warnings come as Calumet Specialty Products Partners L.P. weighs shipping tar sands crude across the Great Lakes.
"We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg and only just beginning to understand the grave impacts these extreme energy projects are going to have on the Great Lakes," Maude Barlow, chairperson of watchdog group Council of Canadians, warned earlier this year. "If governments continue to allow projects like this, what are our lakes going to look like in 20 or 50 years?" she asked.
For those living in the Great Lakes region of the U.S., a warning re-issued in Michigan this week may provide a shuddering thought: authorities there say they are unprepared to deal with a heavy crude spill in the lakes.
Speaking Tuesday at the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority at an international forum on "sinking oils, known as Class V" (which includes tar sands), Rear Adm. Fred Midgette, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's District 9, said that responders, including the Coast Guard, were urgently trying to come up with a plan to deal with a potential heavy spill in Great Lakes' waters, the Detroit Free Press reports.
The Free Press adds:
Midgette said he was particularly concerned that response plans and organizations "are not capable of responding to heavy oil spills, particularly in open-water scenarios," in an Aug. 20 memo to the Coast Guard's Deputy Commandant for Operations.
On Wednesday at the Great Lakes Restoration Conference in Grand Rapids, Jerry Popiel, incident management advisor for the U.S. Coast Guard's Ninth District, made a similar warning about the potential of heavy crude traveling across the Great Lakes. "The piece we really struggle with is the recovery of heavy oils off the bottom in deep water," MLive.com reports him as saying.
Lyman Welch, a water quality program director with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, who spoke along with Popiel, said, "Look at the Kalamazoo example and what happened there," referring to the 2010 spill of tar sands crude from an Enbridge pipeline.
The Coast Guard outlined these problems in a 2013 report, stating in its Executive Summary: "Current methods are inadequate to find and recover submerged [class V] oils with responders having to reinvent the techniques on each occasion."
The Alliance for the Great Lakes issued a report last year as well which focused on the region's gaps in preparedness for tar sands spills. "The regulatory and response framework for petroleum shipping on the Great Lakes is not fully up to the task of protecting the lakes from spills today, and is certainly not an adequate starting point from which to consider the viability of tar sands crude shipment by vessel," the report stated.
These reiterated warnings come as Calumet Specialty Products Partners L.P. weighs shipping tar sands crude across the Great Lakes.
"We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg and only just beginning to understand the grave impacts these extreme energy projects are going to have on the Great Lakes," Maude Barlow, chairperson of watchdog group Council of Canadians, warned earlier this year. "If governments continue to allow projects like this, what are our lakes going to look like in 20 or 50 years?" she asked.
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.