Toxic rocks and declining health: 3.5 years after Enbridge's tar sands pipeline disaster

From:  Rabble

by Sonia Grant

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As communities in Ontario and Quebec await the National Energy Board’s (NEB) decision on the Line 9 reversal, new details about the devastating impacts of Enbridge’s now infamous 2010 Kalamazoo River spill in Michigan raise a series of unanswered questions about the health impacts of exposure to spilled diluted bitumen (dilbit), and about Enbridge’s ability to manage potential pipeline incidents.

The Kalamazoo River’s toxic rocks

The Kalamazoo River had been Craig Ritter’s playground for many years. After work, he loved to go fishing in the river and hike along the banks. This all changed when in July 2010, Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline ruptured, spilling over one million gallons of dilbit from the Alberta tar sands into Talmadge Creek, a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. Since then, Ritter still makes almost daily river trips, but will never fish there again. Instead, he has been photo-documenting the effects of the spill and ongoing cleanup.

In the spring of 2013, Ritter began finding strange rock formations all along the 60km stretch of the river affected by the spill. The rocks he found, which may be tufa rocks, were porous and appeared to be composed of river sediment. But what really shocked Ritter was what happened when he rubbed two rocks together: "the pieces fell into the river and left a light oil sheen on the water surface," he described.

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