Sex, Oil, and Videotape

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from MotherJones:


Sex, Oil, and Videotape
Is John Bolenbaugh out to expose the truth about a massive oil spill—or to redeem his own dark past?

—By Ted Genoways
| Sun Apr. 22, 2012 3:00 AM PDT


Part 1: The whistleblower


I rolled to a stop and cut the engine. John Bolenbaugh leaned forward in the passenger seat and surveyed the scene. "We can walk over there," he said, and we stepped out onto a gravel track overlooking a marshy bottomland behind Sheet Metal Workers Local 7 in Marshall, Michigan. The town's water tower sprouted on the horizon behind us, and ahead, in the distance, we could just make out the beeping of backup warnings and the rumble of diesel engines. We unloaded Bolenbaugh's ubiquitous supplies—a rake, a digital video camera, the day's newspaper, and a pair of surgical gloves—and set out across the soggy ground. As we tromped to the edge of a wide pond, we could see a line of blaze-orange temporary fencing and, on the other side, a crew on track excavators and wheel-loaders digging out nearby Talmadge Creek. At the water's edge, Bolenbaugh switched on his camera. It was late November 2011, just before Thanksgiving, and the crisp air carried the first hints of winter—but Bolenbaugh, without pause or warning or a single thought for the cold, waded out knee-deep into the pond.

Almost every day for more than a year, this had been Bolenbaugh's daily activity—shooting video of the slow-going cleanup of one of the worst inland oil spills in American history. And on that day he wanted me to see "ground zero," the exact spot where, in late July 2010, an underground pipeline owned by Canadian-based Enbridge, Inc., ruptured and spilled more than a million gallons of crude derived from the Alberta tar sands—enough to flow out of this pond into the distant creek and on to the Kalamazoo River. A former cleanup worker himself, Bolenbaugh was fired in October 2010 by Enbridge contractor SET Environmental, because, Bolenbaugh says, he refused to follow top-down instructions to cover up oil.

His whistleblower lawsuit, which accuses SET of wrongful dismissal,went to trial last Wednesday. In pretrial motions, SET attorneys moved to exclude any mention of an oil coverup, but James C. Kingsley, judge for the 37th Circuit Court of Michigan, ruled that the question is fundamental to Bolenbaugh's whistleblower claim—and, therefore, a matter for the jury to decide.

Thus, this case could provide a judgment—perhaps the only official judgment, since federal regulators have largely looked the other way—on Enbridge's handling of the whole oil spill. That determination is about far more than legal fingerpointing. Roughly 20 percent of America's crude oil, according to the US Interior Department, is now imported from Canada, and most of that is derived from tar sands. With the national jobless rate still high, more and more Americans are willing to accept the environmental and health risks associated with pipelines that carry tar sands crude. And as oil prices continue climbing, Canadian companies are racing to cash in. Enbridge is poised to become the largest transporter of tar sands crude in the country, and its top competitor TransCanada is seeking to build the controversial $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline across the Great Plains to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/04/john-bolenbaugh-enbridge-michigan-spill

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