americas
The Sheen Michigan’s oil spill.
by erin shadowens interviewees Levi Richmond, Gull Lake, Michigan; Heather Keenan and Terri Larson, Enbridge Energy; Michael Dirksen, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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THE EPOCH JOURNAL
“I
would drive through Galesburg and see some of the boom getting across the river and see the trucks for the clean up,” explains Levi Richmond, a resident of Augusta, Michigan, regarding the Kalamazoo River oil spill in September. The Kalamazoo river is a major water tributary for Lake Michigan. “There was a big uproar. It happened after BP and people were upset.” Richmond refers to the Deepwater Horizon spill, an oil rig belonging to BP (formerly British Petroleum) that exploded last April and damaged an underwater drilling well, allowing approximately five million barrels of oil to spill off the Gulf coast. The well continued to leak throughout summer until cleanup teams could successfully cap the well in September. In July, at the height of the Deepwater debacle, an oil pipeline in Michigan belonging to Canadian company Enbridge Energy began to leak into Talmadge Creek, leading into the Kalamazoo River. Estimates for the spill range from 877,000 to more than a million gallons of oil, the largest oil spill in the history of the midwestern United States. In a written statement to The Epoch, Heather Keenan and Terri Larson of Enbridge Energy explained that for most of the environmental and economic consequences of the spill, “It is too early to know.” Although the clean-up remains ongoing and the damage to the local ecosystem is still unclear, Richmond remarks that the community’s response seems underwhelmed. “Keeping it [water resources] clean is a big deal, so I can see how that would have an effect and having it [the spill] so close to home