Inside Environmental Emergency Response

My guest, Kathryn Scannell, writes fantasy and erotic romance. Like most writers, she still has a day job, which involves working for an environmental response contractor. Today she’s sharing a little of what it’s like to be part of the official response to an environmental disaster.

We’ve all seen environmental disasters on the news in recent years. The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf last summer got a lot of coverage. Most of that coverage is focused on pictures of the disaster, with a few pictures of people in tyvek suits to spice it up. There’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes.

As an example, let’s look at a smaller incident, which I had some involvement with last summer. At the end of July, there was a major oil spill in the little town of Marshall, Michigan. An underground pipeline delivering oil from Canada to a refinery in the US ruptured one night, releasing oil into the ground. It rapidly found its way to a nearby creek and from there into the Kalamazoo River. The rupture was not immediately discovered, and by the time the problem was understood and it was shut down, and EPA estimates that 819,000 gallons of oil were released. This is a tiny fraction compared to the gulf, but to the people of Marshall if was a disaster. The EPA has a web page with the background, and many pictures for anyone who would like to know more : http://www.epa.gov/enbridgespill/

Response was immediate. Residents in nearby homes were evacuated because oil fumes contain cancer causing chemicals, notably benzene, and there was concern that they were present at levels which would be a health risk. EPA response contractors and responders from Enbridge Oil, which owned the pipeline, converged on the site within hours. At first the response ran around the clock, with people working 12 hours shifts. This continued for roughly a month, until a significant fraction of the spilled oil had been recovered using floating booms, giant vacuum trucks, and excavation equipment to remove contaminated soil. Air monitoring went on around the clock too, to determine if it was safe to allow people to return to their homes.