Tagged: oil spill

Governor Snyder stands by pension tax

Governor Snyder is standing by a new state tax on retirees' pensions despite calls from both Republicans and Democrats to repeal the legislation.

"A group of five Republican state senators wants to repeal the pension tax, and reinstate some homestead property tax credits. Snyder says the tax on pensions is just a matter of fairness so the tax burden falls equally," Michigan Radio's Steve Carmody reports.  

E. Coli outbreak reaches Michigan

Two Michigan boys are among those sickened by a nationwide outbreak of E. coli.

"The contamination has been traced to Farm Rich frozen food products including mini pizza slices, mini quesadillas with cheese and chicken, philly cheese steaks with cheese, and mozzarella bites. The recalled products were sold at Kroger, Spartan Stores and other chain supermarkets," according to Steve Carmody.

Oil spill on Grand River linked to malfunctioning equipment

The Board of Water and Light is attributing an oil spill into the Grand River in Lansing this weekend to a malfunctioning piece of equipment at their Eckert Power Plant.

"A utility spokesperson says fewer than 300 gallons of oil seeped into the Grand River. Oil-collecting booms have been deployed to contain the spill," reports Steve Carmody.

There's good news and bad news for residents with drinking water wells near the Kalamazoo River. A massive oil spill contaminated the river in 2010.

State officials tested 150 of the residential water wells for contaminants.

“Now the oil related chemicals, those would have been iron and nickel, they were detected in a few wells but nothing but was levels of concern,” says Angela Minicuci, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Community Health.

This Wednesday marks the second anniversary of the Kalamazoo River oil spill.

A national environmental group is releasing a report today attacking the company whose pipeline broke.

Enbridge Energy will take its plans for a new oil pipeline across the state of Michigan to state regulators this week.

The new pipeline will replace the one that ruptured in 2010, spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River.

An ongoing investigation into the 2010 Enbridge oil spill by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is raising concern over frequent staff turnover and inexperience among personnel in the company’s Endmonton control-room.

Last Friday, the NTSB added new materials to the public accident docket, including transcribed interviews with Enbridge staff.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports:

In the transcripts, one control-room operator likens his job to that of an air traffic controller and says he’d like to see Enbridge do more to retain control-room staff in the hot Alberta job market.

“And you just don’t have air traffic controllers coming in and out of the system like that, right, because you know that it will impact safety, right?” says the transcription. “So, I’d like to see them really look at keeping people in the control-room, keeping us happy in there, and I don’t know what it’s going to take, but that’s what I’d like to see.”

The employee added that when he started working at the company 25 years ago, he could count a combined 100 years of experience among four employees in the control-room. Now, he said, the experienced personnel in the room tend to only have three or four years under their belts.

The NTSB also reported that the time of the spill coincided with a shift change in the control-room, offering a possible explanation of why the spill went unnoticed for hours.

In a press release, Enbridge officials said that they would wait to comment on the new findings until the NTSB publishes its final report later this fall. In the release, officials added that the company been working to improve the safety of its operations in the two years since the spill by doing things like changing the “structure and leadership of functional departments such as pipeline control, leak detection and system integrity.”

- Suzanne Jacobs, Michigan Radio Newsroom