Workers say Garner Environmental covering up partial clean up efforts

BATTLE CREEK — Oil spill cleanup workers are alleging that Garner Environmental — a key contractor for Enbridge Energy Partners — is instructing those who work for them to cover up oil-soaked areas rather than clean them up.

Garner Environmental is a Texas company and a major contractor hired by Enbridge to conduct the cleanup. The company has already weathered one controversy when a Michigan Messenger investigation discovered that a subcontractor that it hired, Hallmark Industrial, had hired undocumented workers and had them toiling on the river between 12 and 14 hours a day, seven days a week for $800 a week. The workers were paid in cash, and provided hotel rooms and meals.

All of the workers spoke with Michigan Messenger on the condition of anonymity because they want to continue working on the cleanup efforts in Calhoun county. Both Enbridge and Garner have had employees, contractors and subcontractors sign non-disclosure agreements.

All of the workers who spoke with Messenger are certified with what is called a HAZWOPER 40 certification. That means they are certified as having trained 40 hours of dealing with hazardous materials, such as oil. The designation is a federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration program and the acronym stands for Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response.

The workers say that they were routinely directed to by supervisors of Garner Environmental services and one of its contractors to ignore contaminated areas on the shores of the Kalamazoo river. Others, working in a different section of the river, say they were routinely directed to cover oil-soaked soil with uncontaminated soil, rake it and leave it as though the area had been cleaned.

When a team of workers would land on an island in the river, they would be directed to remove all the vegetation and bag it. It was sent down the river to be sent to an EPA approved dumping location. Once the vegetation was removed, workers would lay out absorbent material called pom poms to absorb any liquid oil on the top of the soil.

Once that was complete, the workers say they were directed to rake the area to make it appear as though all the oil had been removed.

“One guy, he showed me how to do it. He picked up clean dirt and he sprinkled it on the oiled soil,” one of the workers told the Michigan Messenger. “He said there, now they can’t see it. It is clean.”

“Another guy told me to just put leaves and other stuff in a low place where oil was collecting. He said it would look like a natural dent and no one would pay attention to it,” said a second worker.

Once an area had been raked to give the appearance of a groomed, oil free area, workers would wrap the area with caution tape.

“No one could step in there. If they did, you could see the oil,” said a worker.

Mark Durno, deputy on-site incident commander for the Environmental Protection Agency, said the work described by the workers was concerning.

“That practice shouldn’t be happening,” Durno said of the soil cover up. He said in some instances, workers left contaminated vegetation and absorbent materials called pom poms piled up on an island, but they were removed the following day.

But some of those islands might continue to have oil contamination, even after the major clean up is completed.

“Our concern is that those islands are so close to the river level, that digging down into them will cause us to lose the islands,” Durno said. He said members of the Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Team, or SCAT, will be re-visiting those sites to determine exactly how to deal with the remaining oil pockets.

He says in some instances, the soil will be removed, but in others it will remain.

Leaving pockets of oil on the river’s islands could lead to future oil slicks. The oil contamination is above the flood stage of the river because when the pipeline rupture happened, the river was nearly two feet above flood stage.

In order to prevent more oil from contaminating the river again, Durno said that containment booms and absorbent booms will remain around islands with oil patches on them.

On top of the revelations about the island clean up and hiding of oil there, workers say they were also directed by a Garner supervisor to remove all vegetation along the shoreline, up to ten feet, whether the vegetation was oiled or not. If there was oil beyond the ten foot demarcation, workers were ordered to ignore it.

“[A supervisor] from Garner said not to go more than 10 feet (off the shore), no matter if there is oil or not,” said one worker. “They cannot see that (oil ten feet or more from the shore) from the copter.”

The EPA and other officials routinely fly up an down the river in helicopters to monitor clean up efforts.

EPA’s Durno says the current efforts are only one part of a five part plan in relation to oiled shores and the clean up. The SCAT Teams have already identified areas where the removal of vegetation was necessary. Next, the EPA, the SCAT Team and Enbridge will all conduct independent reviews of those sites to determine how much, if any, additional clean up is necessary. Once the second round of cleanup is complete, the EPA will inspect again, and sign off on the locations.

If oil remains, Durno said, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the Environment will continue to monitor those sites.

Durno said some sites, such as emergent wetlands — which are delicate ecological systems — may not see any remediation beyond the removal of the gross contamination.

“Those wetlands can take care of the oil in two or three years, whereas if we do it, we will destroy those wetlands and it will take ten or twenty years for them to come back,” Durno said. He added that in the case of such wetlands, booming can be expected to remain in place for as much as a year after the major clean up is declared complete.

Meanwhile environmentalists are raising concerns about leaving oil on the islands in the river.

“On the face of it, it looks like a short cut,” says Hugh McDiarmid Jr., communications director of the Michigan Environmental Council. “In terms of these types of specific plans to leave oil on the river, they should get input from a number of experts rather than just Enbridge and the EPA making the decisions. The local people deserve to have that explained to them.”

Durno says there will be no chance for public input on the last phase of clean up which is expected to last until the end of September. He did say he expects once the state takes over management of the places where contamination remains, that it will seek the input of stakeholders.

Garner has not returned multiple calls for comment for this and other stories.