Oil on shore of Kalamazoo River (Photo by Todd Heywood)Enbridge and government officials have refused to give details on the inspection record for the section of oil pipeline that sprung a leak in Marshall, Michigan this week, spilling more than 800,000 gallons of crude oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River.

Under current federal rules less than half of the oil pipelines in the country are required to be actively monitored for defects and safety problems.

Oil pipelines are regulated by the U.S. Dept. of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Since 2002 the agency has required pipeline operators to conduct “Integrity Management” operations to “identify, prioritize, assess, evaluate, repair and validate” the integrity of their pipelines. This rule, however, only applies to sections of pipeline that run through designated “High Consequence Areas.”

According to PHMSA High Consequence Areas are those that involve population areas, drinking water and ecological resources that are unusually sensitive to environmental damage and commercially navigable waterways.

Both Enbridge and PHMSA have declined to say whether the section of pipeline that ruptured this week was subject to regulation as a High Consequence Area. If this section is not designated as a HCA then the company may not have been required to test its integrity since it was installed in 1969.

Regardless of whether it is considered high consequence, the pipeline leak has indisputably impacted water resources. Crude oil has migrated from Talmadge Creek into the Kalamazoo River and into Morrow Lake. As of yesterday afternoon Michigan officials said that the oil had breached the Morrow dam and threatened to damage a section of the Kalamazoo River that is already an active Superfund site. Some have warned that the spill could reach Lake Michigan this weekend, a possibility that Gov. Jennifer Granholm said would be “a tragedy of epic proportions.”

(The U.S. Dept. of Transportation would not say whether it considers the Kalamazoo River a “commercially navigable waterway.”)

Even in areas where Enbridge has been required to conduct safety testing, ruptures have occurred.

In January a rupture near Neches, North Dakota spilled crude oil into a wetland in the section of Enbridge’s pipeline that runs between the Canadian border and Superior, Wisconsin.

In a Corrective Action Order issued by PHMSA the agency stated that the results of ultrasonic crack detection tool runs in 2009 had not been made available to regulators.

PHSMA also stated that it had repeatedly warned the company that the pre-1970 low frequency electric welded pipe in use in that area is susceptible to seam failure.

Carl Weimer of the Pipeline Safety Trust — a non-profit funded by the U.S. Justice Dept. after a deadly pipeline accident in Washington state — testified in May at U.S. House hearing on pipeline safety that regulators should require pipeline operators to conduct safety testing on all pipelines.

In response to horrific pipeline tragedies, Congress required integrity management in High Consequence Areas as a way to protect the people who live, work and play near pipelines, as well to protect sensitive environmental areas and this nation’s critical energy infrastructure.

Before integrity management, a pipeline company could install a pipeline transporting huge quantities of often explosive fuel and leave it uninspected indefinitely – even for 50, 60, or 70 years. Even today only 7% of natural gas transmission pipelines and 44% of hazardous liquid pipelines fall under these inspection programs. To be blunt, it is not “safe” to wait until a pipeline explodes to learn about its integrity.

Weimer said that since Integrity Management rules began to be implemented in 2002, more than 75 percent of the deaths caused by pipeline accidents have occurred in areas that fall outside integrity management requirements.

“[I]t is not credible to tell the American people that the pipelines in their communities are safe when the integrity of these pipelines may not have been assessed in over half a century,” he said.

Though PHMSA has made some strides in improving pipeline regulation in recent years, he said, the agency still has problems with transparency.

Information about High Consequence Areas and company emergency response plans are not readily available to the public, he said.

One area where PHMSA could go even further in transparency would be a web‐based system that would allow public access to basic inspection information about specific pipelines. An inspection transparency system would allow the affected public to review when PHMSA and its state partners inspected particular pipelines, what types of inspections were performed, what was found, and how any concerns were rectified. Inspection transparency should increase the public’s trust in the checks and balances in place to make pipelines safe.

According to PHMSA there are 2,879 miles of hazardous liquid pipeline in Michigan.

Much of that network is operated by Enbridge, which has two pipelines that cross Michigan. One comes from Superior, Wisconsin, crosses the length of the Upper Peninsula and the straits of Mackinac and then moves south to Sarnia, Ontario. The other comes from the South, connecting Griffith, Indiana to Sarnia. This is the stretch where the rupture occurred this week.

Enbridge did not say how much of its Michigan network involves High Consequence Areas.

Enbridge supplies 50 percent of the crude oil refined in the Great Lakes region.