Ingham County pollution prevention plan skips pipeline contents

LANSING — The Ingham County Board of Commissioners is considering a new law which will have businesses in the county paying a small fee to register the chemical hazards of their business to help emergency responders in case of a spill or leak. But the new plan does not include any of the three pipeline systems running through the county.

“Since [pipelines] have different product traveling through these lines all the time, it would be impractical trying to monitor it 24/7 as it passes through Ingham County,” says Renee Canady, deputy health officer of the Ingham County Health Department, which is pushing the new legislation.

She points to the county’s All Hazards Plan and emergency planning documents to support the need not to collect information about what is running through the pipelines in the county. Those plans include preparations for pipeline emergencies, such as the devastating oil spill in Calhoun county at the end of July.

Michigan Messenger reported last week that Calhoun County’s Disaster Mitigation plan — another name for the All Hazards Plan — contained scant information about pipeline emergencies.

In Calhoun, Enbridge Energy Partners’ Lakehead Pipeline 6B ruptured just south of Marshall, spewing an estimated one million gallons of heavy crude oil into the Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. The incident was the largest oil spill in Midwest history. Cleanup on the river continues and monitoring for contamination is expected to continue for at least two years.

Canady says the relationships between the three pipeline companies operating in the county and county officials is “mutually beneficial” and that “we all work together to protect our county.”

“Fortunately this philosophy has negated the need for forced or legal action to obtain the information,” Canady says.

But in an interview with Michigan Messenger, Sgt. Robert Ott, Emergency Management Program Manager of the Ingham County Sheriff Department’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division, had a different take on the county’s relationship with the pipeline companies.

He says his office has partnerships with both Wolverine Pipeline, which transports gasoline and other oil distillates, and Consumer’s Energy, which transports natural gas, that feature regular communications.

“We don’t have a negative relationship with them, but we don’t get the information from them that we get from Wolverine,” Ott says of the county’s relationship with Enbridge. “Again, when you talk about anomalies in the lines or problems within the lines — something that may effect us — we just like to be notified of that.”

Ott says Wolverine and Consumers both make an effort to inform the county when their pipelines have issues. But in his post, a position he has held for two years, the county was never notified of hundreds of anomalies detected on Enbridge’s Lakehead 6B line, which runs through southern Ingham county, until the rupture of the line in Marshall in July. Enbridge transports various forms of crude oil in North America’s largest network of pipelines.

Ott says it would be “helpful” to have the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) of the various materials that are flowing through the pipes at any given time. What is in the line became an issue this summer in Calhoun as well when congressional investigators discovered that the leaders of the cleanup were making health and safety decisions related to the spill and river contamination based on a generic MSDS sheet for crude oil.

The oil that was actually spilling into the area was actually a heavier crude, laced with more heavy metals than found in sweet crude oil. The oil was also cut with diluent, which itself is a petroleum mix that gives off benzene and other volatile organic chemicals.

The investigators reported that the evacuation zone for the Cold Lake crude that was flowing with the river should have been at least a thousand feet, and been mandatory, not voluntary. Instead, health officials determined a limited evacuation zone was necessary.

That, Ott says, is something he would like to avoid, and is likely a “lesson learned” from the Calhoun incident. In fact, he tells Michigan Messenger that his office will do a hands-on drill with full response for a pipeline incident next year to make sure the plans work as expected.

Meanwhile, the Commission and health department continue refining the Pollution Prevention Regulation. The Ingham County Board of Commissioners Human Services Committee held a hearing on the proposed regulation Oct. 10.

Under the proposal, businesses with regulated chemicals would have to register their stocks with the county within 10 calendar days from the implementation of the new regulation, or the company starts stocking regulated chemicals. After that, each business in the county would register its chemicals on Jan. 1 of each year.

Additionally, the regulation requires the Bureau of Environmental Health of the Ingham County Health Department to provide information to the public about what kind of chemicals and how much are stored in buildings and businesses near them.

County officials say businesses covered by the new regulation have been supportive, in part because of an August fire in Mason. That fire and explosion at Americhem Sales was sparked by static electricity. No one was killed or seriously injured in the incident, but first responders were faced with a blaze fueled in part by industrial chemicals, solvents, oils and automotive fluids the company sold.

The regulation will be taken up by the entire board of commissioners in a coming meeting. The difference of opinion between Ott and county health officials will be ironed out in the meantime. One focus will be on making sure the public knows what dangerous chemicals are stored near their homes and businesses.

“I believe it is important for us to have an informed citizenry in this regard,” Canady says.