MARSHALL, MICHIGAN--(Marketwire - Aug. 1, 2010) -
Excerpt from Joint News Conference, 3 p.m. Eastern Time, August 1, 2010
Marshall, Michigan.
Patrick Daniel, President & CEO, Enbridge Inc.
I toured the river again this morning and progress on the clean-up has been very good. There is very little free oil on the river at this point. As of today there is no oil on the river - sheen only upstream of Battle Creek. While there is some level of sheen, most is now gone.
I believe yesterday the EPA characterized the state of the river as remarkable - we need at Enbridge to continue to ensure that performance continues.
I want to re-emphasize something I that said yesterday - we are absolutely committed to doing this right and to the satisfaction of everyone here in Marshall and the surrounding area.
We are going to clean up this spill, we're going to restore this river, and we're going to continue to be a part of this community where we've been since 1969.
We now have 730 people in total working on the river. We appreciate the efforts of all the other responders who are working with us on the clean-up. It has been a remarkable team effort.
I want to expand on an answer to a question from yesterday and emphasize that people do not have to sue Enbridge to be reimbursed. I've made the commitment from the outset: we will pay all legitimate damages from the spill. Information about processing claims is going to be on our web site dedicated to the incident and on the hotline number.
I also want to directly comment and address rumors that have continued to circulate about when Enbridge knew about this leak.
Our first notification was on Monday morning as reported. We have checked and double-checked our phone records. No such call was received by Enbridge on Sunday. We have confirmed again that no Enbridge employee at Marshall was out on that call on Sunday night.
Part of the investigation is attempting to determine if someone else's truck was in the area. But we know that if there was another white a truck, it wasn't ours. So I have a plea to the community: if anyone knows anything about this rumored white truck, please come forward and help clear up this misunderstanding.
I want to reiterate the commitment I have made at these press conferences and on other occasions. Our goal is to return this river to the state it was in before this incident. I have made that commitment to everyone. We will stay until that is done. And in fact we will stay beyond because we live and are part of this community.
I would like to make one other comment. In recent days there has been a lot of misinformation and speculation by parties that are not directly involved in the response or the investigation of the cause of the accident. These individuals are doing a disservice to the people of the community and to the agencies that are working so hard to address the issue.
It is a very difficult task in front of us, we need to dedicate all of our resources to the task at hand; but the misinformation is causing everyone to spend time chasing down misinformation and that is not beneficial to this community or to the agencies. So I would strongly urge everyone to please respect the hard work being done by all of these officials on what has been a very challenging problem.
Steve Wuori, Executive Vice President, Liquids Pipelines, Enbridge Pipelines Inc.
I'll start with the recovered volume. We heard earlier from EPA concerning the total barrels of mix. We estimate that we have now recovered approximately 10,000 barrels of oil in total.
The increase is largely due largely to the amount of oil that we are directly recovering at the spill site. That is oil that never reached the creek and the river, it was contained in that swamp area right adjacent to the pipe and we're pulling volumes out of there quite rapidly now so the recovered barrels of oil are climbing.
We are pulling substantially lower volumes off the river and in fact there are locations where we are re-deploying vacuum trucks from certain locations where we are now sucking almost pure water or nearly all water.
It is very hard to suck sheen and so we are redeploying those vacuum trucks so they can be more effective. We are seeing a very high percentage of water going into the vacuum trucks on the river. So increases in volume from this point forward will almost be entirely due to what is remaining at the spill site.
We have increased in last 48 hours the boom sites to 36 as we heard earlier and the figure I have is now is 69,000 feet of boom has now been deployed using the resources that the EPA and Enbridge have brought to bear. We really have deployed boom now to all of the needed sites. We're focused now on beginning clean-up as the containment phase is now largely finished.
As Pat said, are now a total of 730 people working on the cleanup between the day and night shifts.
These are the stats on the equipment we have in use:
-- 79 vacuum trucks -- 19 tanker trucks -- 43 other boats -- several skimmers
In terms of the spill site, we are continuing to pump oil and water from that site. The plan right now is to cut out the affected section of pipe in the early morning hours on Tuesday. However, this is subject to determination by the Transportation Safety Board as to their completion of the investigation of the specimen before it is cut out.
Last thing I want to address is a question that actually came up yesterday that was concerning a meeting with the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in Washington or earlier this year.
PHMSA, I have said often times - and particularly the Office of Pipeline Safety - is a very active regulator and we meet frequently.
I did some checking and in addition to office meetings at various times in the central region office, of the OPS and the city and also Washington, DC, OPS has conducted approximately 45 inspections of Enbridge facilities and records during the last ten years. So they are a very active regulator and there are a lot of meetings going on which certainly would explain why when one particular meeting was identified I couldn't immediately recall it.
However on checking, I believe the reference is to a meeting on February the 4th in Washington. I attended that along with a number of Enbridge operations and pipeline integrity people. This meeting has, I think, been mischaracterized as Enbridge having been summoned to Washington and actually, the meeting was done because of two reasons. One - a new administrator of PHMSA had been appointed by the Obama Administration and we felt that it would be important for us to meet with the new administrator. So that was one and the other was to talk about Enbridge facilities specifically.
That meeting occurred on February 4th and I can tell you exactly what we talked about.
The first was of course to meet with the new administrator and two or three senior leaders from the PHMSA and the office of Pipeline Safety.
Second was to provide an overview of Enbridge, our facilities and general geography.
The third was to cover our environment, health and safety and pipeline integrity management plan policy and philosophy.
The fourth was to talk about three lines specifically -- of the 12 to 15 main lines - lines that we have under PHMSA jurisdiction in the liquids pipeline area and those are 2, 3, and 6B. So we talked about those lines as we concluded the meeting. That was the purpose of the meeting.
We were not summoned to Washington. It was to provide an overview, to talk about specific issues that we have ongoing. I stress that this an ongoing dialogue that we have with the regulator.
Enbridge has launched a website to provide updates and further information about the Company's response to the leak on the 6B pipeline near Marshall, Michigan. The URL for the website is response.enbridgeus.com.
For more information please contact:
Enbridge Energy Partners, L.P.
Toll-free Media Line: (888) 992-0997
or
Enbridge Energy Partners, L.P.
Investor Relations
Vern Yu
(403) 231-3946