MARSHALL, MICHIGAN -- (Marketwire) -- 08/04/10 -- Excerpt from Joint News Conference, 3 p.m. Eastern Time, August 4, 2010
Marshall, Michigan.
Patrick Daniel, President & CEO, Enbridge Inc.
Good afternoon everyone. I toured the river again this morning all the way down to Morrow Lake and I'm very happy to report that the River continues to clear.
The majority of the sheen now is in the upstream portion from Battle Creek on up to the entrance at Talmadge Creek. We are also very actively now pursuing shore clean-up in addition to continuing to remove sheen from the river.
As was indicated earlier by Jim Rutherford we've had a lot of calls to our hotline and at times that line has been very busy. We're in the process right now of making a number of technical improvements to the line to accommodate callers and to insure effective follow-up so there are no numbers missed and that we're following up with everyone calling.
We also think that our community centers, which we're opening in Battle Creek - in fact, we have opened now in Battle Creek and also the one in Marshall, which will open on Monday morning, will help a lot in terms of relieving the heavy call volume on the hotline. The key thing is that we contact and follow up with every resident who has a concern.
We've had a very good and favorable response from home owners with regard to the offer for home purchases that we made yesterday. We want, and the intention of this program, is to ensure that no one suffers any diminution of value in their property as a result of this incident.
We continue to meet with community residents as well, both in individual meetings and also in group meetings. We're going to meet again tonight with a group of residents for one of the voluntary evacuation areas. In addition to that we're having small neighborhood gatherings and gatherings in people's living rooms trying to explain our commitment and our responsibility with regard to this clean-up and providing assurances on issues such as home values.
If any residents want to meet with us please contact us. We'd be happy to do so, to set up individual meetings or group meetings.
As I have mentioned so many times, we are here to address the concerns of residents and we take full responsibility for doing that. So, if you have a concern or an issue, please bring it forward to Enbridge.
At this point what I'd like to do is turn it over to Steve Wuori who is going to provide an operational update and provide some addresses with regard to those community centers for all interested residents.
Steve Wuori, Executive Vice President, Liquids Pipelines, Enbridge Pipelines Inc.
Thank you, Pat. Good afternoon, everyone. Just a few comments. First of all, along the river we have moved from the containment phase into the clean-up phase and are cleaning the shoreline.
I think as we've mentioned before, and in fact in the past several days, what we're finding is that very little oil is coming to us and we are now going after the oil and sending teams to various areas along the shoreline to find it. So people may notice that we are moving people and equipment around and it signals the next stage of the clean-up.
One example is that the large vacuum trucks that have been seen well downstream and through the Battle Creek area will be redeployed from those sites where there really is very little oil left to recover and they really have been sucking mostly water - they'll be moved to places more upstream or perhaps at the spill site itself and that will create room for crews with more of the absorbents that are necessary for shoreline clean-up.
We are monitoring the river's water quality at multiple monitoring stations and that includes Morrow Lake and, as Mark Durno mentioned from EPA, we have established through the Unified Command a Task Force for Morrow Lake specifically just to look at any issues that are there and certainly if any spots of sheen show up that Task Force immediately goes there.
We're also looking for any areas that could still produce odor and we're actually deploying some odor canisters that capture air over a 24 hour period because odor tends to come and go depending on wind and humidity and so on. So we are looking at areas where these odor canisters will identify that there is odors over that period and that will help us identify areas that crews should prioritize as they go after the pockets of oil along the shoreline.
At the leak site we continue to make progress in the de-watering and the excavation of the contaminated soil and I would say that the area is just about completely surrounded by equipment now for - for withdrawal of the oil and water. We are also continuing excavation around the pipe itself to expose it for examination and cut-out.
I would just conclude on the operational update by saying that we continue to work well through the Unified Command and - and we will keep at that. I think that process is working very well.
We also, as Pat mentioned, have opened, as of eight o'clock this morning, a Claims Office in Battle Creek at 77 East Michigan Avenue in downtown Battle Creek in the Commerce Pointe Building and we will have an address probably by tomorrow for the Claims Centre that we will open on Monday morning here in Marshall. So, we look forward to being much better able to process claims from those two places in both Battle Creek and in Marshall. And that is my update for today.
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.
Contacts:
Enbridge Energy Partners, L.P.
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Enbridge Energy Partners, L.P.
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Vern Yu
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