I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
BATTLE CREEK — As the cleanup of more than 1 million gallons of oil into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River continues, there are a lot of words swirling around which are not in the everyday vocabulary. Michigan Messenger presents this visual glossary to help you understand the terminology.
Booms. These inflatable tubes are stretched across waterways and force the oil to collection points. The Kalamazoo River has both orange and yellow booms.
Here is a boom in place on the Kalamazoo River.
Skimmer. Once the oil is moved by the booms to a collection point, it comes in contact with a skimmer, like this one waiting for action at River Oaks Park in Comstock. The drum on the skimmer, spins around, the oil sticks to it, and then is removed from the drum into a reservoir on the skimmer. The skimmer is then connected to a vacuum truck which hoovers the oil into a tank.
This is the back side of a vacuum truck. The oil is sucked up into the storage tanker, then transferred to a traditional tanker truck for transportation to Indiana, where Enbridge is collecting all the oil in order to better estimate how much was released in the incident.
Here you can see a cleanup worker using a vacuum truck pipe to suck up oil collected on the Kalamazoo River on the west side of Battle Creek.
Sheen. This is the infamous sheen of oil which has been much talked about. It leads the oil spill and is actually a very light coating of oil on the river. This shot was taken on the Kalamazoo River about three miles from the source of the spill.
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