EPA says Kalamazoo River clean up making progress

Despite Enbridge Energy Partners’ failure to meet an Aug. 31 deadline to remove an estimated 200 acres of submerged oil from the bottom of the Kalamazoo River, EPA officials say the cleanup is making progress.

The Kalamazoo Gazette reports:

“Deadlines have been used in this project to motivate action and motivate progress,” said Ralph Dollhopf, the Environmental Protection Agency’s incident commander for the spill.

“The fact the Enbridge missed the deadline does not mean there is not good progress on this project.”

In the coming weeks, Enbridge clean up crews will focus on submerged oil at the mouth of the river at Morrow Lake in Kalamazoo county, as well as oil in the lake itself. A spring assessment found the heavy oil, referred to as tar-like, at Ceresco Dam as well as Morrow Lake, and other locations in the river. EPA officials said the discoveries during the assessment were unexpected and complicated the clean up.

Enbridge, in a letter to the EPA on Monday, said it was unable to complete the clean up for a variety of reasons.

In a letter Enbridge sent to the EPA on Monday, the Alberta-based pipeline company cited several reasons why crews were unable to meet the deadline, including the dynamics of the river, crews waiting for approval of work plans as well as additional time spent getting customized equipment prepared for the response.

Another factor is “the expanded scope of the spill,” according to the letter. Enbridge says they are finding more oil than what the assessment in May and June discovered.

“Once summer cleanup began after the completion of the reassessment, we learned that some submerged oil locations had shifted since the reassessment and other areas expanded,” the letter reads. “The area actually worked to date has increased by 79 percent over what was identified at the end of the spring reassessment.”

The EPA acknowledged an Aug. 3 letter denying a July 27 request to extend the hours of clean up was an early indicator the Canadian oil company was not likely to meet the cleanup deadline.