Life has returned here, and it hasn't.
The water in Talmadge Creek runs clear now, and small schools of minnows shoot after each other, ducking behind creek rocks that seem too awkwardly settled to have been placed there by nature.
That's because they weren't. In the two years since one of the worst inland oil spills in U.S. history ? when a pipeline break in a nearby marsh sent 819,000 gallons of toxic sludge sliding into the Talmadge and then down more than 30 miles of the Kalamazoo River ? cleanup workers have dredged and rebuilt this creek from the bottom.
Now, Talmadge Creek is slowly headed back to normal, insomuch as normal is possible. The same could be said for the human ecosystem and the empty homes still surrounding the spill area.
The disaster itself was overshadowed by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that same summer, but it offers lessons for other communities and for other pipeline companies eager to tap Canada's lucrative oil sands market for American dollars.
"We believe that these companies are not unique," Deborah Hersman, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said recently of the corporate and regulatory failures that have allowed such spills to happen. "People need to read these reports and understand our recommendations with an eye toward the future."
Government investigators concluded that the pipeline's Canadian owner,Enbridge Inc., knew about the crack that led to the spill five years before the accident. They also found that when the break did occur, employees mistakenly continued to pump oil into parts of southern Michigan.
Like the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge's pipeline carried a heavy crude oil called diluted bitumen, derived from tar sand oil in Canada. As lighter chemicals in the oil vaporized, it settled at the bottom of the Kalamazoo River, out of reach for an easy cleanup.
Before the spill, many residents weren't even aware a pipeline ran through their community. By the time they smelled the fumes and Enbridge trucks took over the roads, the damage had been done. Within a day, Marshall became an oil town in the worst way imaginable.
'We lost our neighbors'
In the long two years of evaluating and dredging and apologizing that followed, Enbridge, like BP in the gulf, staked its image on the well-being of the affected communities, right down to the identical promises to "make things right."
Officials shut down 39 miles of the Kalamazoo River for nearly two years as Enbridge threw thousands of employees and contractors at the cleanup process. The workers filled local hotels and eateries as the company backed community projects, even joining the Marshall Chamber of Commerce.
The company also bought about 150 homes near the spill, altering the social landscape as much as the reinvented Talmadge Creek. Shrouds of weeds now surround the oil-inundated houses of the homeowners who sold to Enbridge.
"It was just a tough emotional experience," nearby resident Carol Kellogg said of the spill and the Enbridge offer to buy her home. In the end, she turned it down. "From the get-go, [my husband] said, 'We're not moving,' and I said, 'Well, let's wait for the appraisal.' It can divide a family. We saw that happen."
She added, "We lost our neighbors. Now it's quiet."
Ralph Dollhopf, the Environmental Protection Agency's on-scene cleanup coordinator, says the ongoing spill cleanup has become more passive.
Instead of dragging the river for sludge, officials now wait for tiny bits of the oil, buried in the muck at the bottom of the Kalamazoo River, to move downriver to natural sediment accumulation points. There, workers gather them up for disposal.
"When you are too invasive with cleanup activity, you run the risk of injuring ecosystems, farm areas, habitat, critical vegetation, bank stability ? all of which can lead to the demise of the river system or even cause more damage than the oil itself," Dollhopf said.
At the end of June, a week after officials reopened the Kalamazoo River, the Michigan Department of Community Health lifted a do-not-eat order for fish caught in the affected stretch of the river, ending a two-year moratorium. The department says the remaining oil doesn't pose any long-term cancer or health risks other than a little skin irritation if touched.
But Rita Chapman, who monitors clean-water issues for the Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club, disagreed with the reopening of the river.
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