cleanup worker turned whistle-blower named John Bolenbaugh_Kalamazoo Michigan spill 2010

Will this be the scene in Lake Eufaula, or somewhere else in Oklahoma, where the tar sands passes through bodies of water or across rivers, such as the Grand River, the Neosho River, or the Canadian River?

photo credit: John W Pool, NPR

story on NPR:

If there's a spill, will they clean up all the oil?

Two years after the spill, Bolenbaugh takes an NPR reporter on a kind of treasure hunt for oil, crashing through jumbles of brush and chest-high grasses.

On the bank of the Kalamazoo River, Bolenbaugh sets up a video camera, because he videotapes everything he does. And then he hurls himself into the river.

A couple of minutes later, he walks out of the river, holding up a blue latex glove covered with tarry black stuff.

"It's like molasses but even a little thicker," Bolenbaugh says. "And it smells like asphalt, kind of. When it was fresh, it was a horrible, horrible smell, like they just paved your road."

As Bolenbaugh tells it, he and other cleanup workers were told to bury oil, which made him furious. So he started taking photos and videos with his cellphone on the sly.

Bolenbaugh was fired after he went to the Environmental Protection Agency and the media. But he sued the contractor he worked for and got a big settlement. Now he's suing Enbridge, the company that runs the pipeline.

He carries around some of the photos and tons of documents in a huge binder, which was part of the evidence for his lawsuit.

"If you notice in this picture, the oil is still there, but we're raking dirt over the top of it," Bolenbaugh says. "That's what we're ordered to do."

Bolenbaugh credits himself with getting Enbridge to redo cleanups. They dug up a two-mile stretch of creek for a second time, after Bolenbaugh showed reporters that a lot of oil was still under the replanted vegetation.

"I got 'em good. And I'm proud of myself for what I've done," he says.

Tar sands oil sank to the river bottom because it's heavy — heavier than almost anything that's considered oil.

"It's not quite solid, and it's not quite liquid," he says. "You could pick it up and shape it into a ball practically. Tarry is another way to think about it."

Tar sands oil has to be diluted to make it liquid enough to flow through a pipeline. But once it's back out in the environment, the chemicals that liquefied it evaporate. That leaves the heavy stuff behind.

Cleanup crews didn't know what they were dealing with. They expected it to act like oil usually does and float on water. So they focused on vacuuming oil and skimming it from the surface.

But about a month into the cleanup, some fish researchers got a surprise. One of them jumped from a boat into the river. With each step he took, little globs of black oil popped up.

That kicked off a search for sunken oil.

"And everywhere they looked, they found it," Hamilton recalls.

EPA's Midwestern chief Susan Hedman says they had to develop new techniques to remove all of this submerged oil.

"The EPA staff that worked on this, that have responded to oil spills over many, many years, had never encountered a spill of this type of material, in this unprecedented volume, under these kinds of conditions," Hedman says.

Scientists say they're only beginning to study how tar sands behave after a spill, or even whether it might wear out a pipeline.

Michelle Barlond-Smith and her husband lived in a riverfront trailer park, where trees still show oil rings about three feet up their trunks.

Barlond-Smith says the sickening fumes from the oil lasted for months.

"Besides the splitting headaches and the dizziness — and we call it the crab walk, which is when you think you're walking straight but you look like a drunk walking down the street — you couldn't eat because you felt like you had two rocks in your stomach just pounding. And when you tried to eat, unpleasant things happened," Barlond-Smith says.

Authorities didn't suggest they evacuate until 10 days after the spill; peak levels of toxic chemicals in the air had p