Fellow DIT-ers, something horrible has happened today. If you haven’t been reading the news, I regret to inform you that 800,000 gallons of oil were released into a creek in Marshall ealier today. Said creek feeds the Kalamazoo River.
Kalamazoo county has declared a state of emergency. This is a picture, created by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment, detailing where the oil spill is and where it is travelling to. Note that the end of the road is Lake Michigan.
There is a facebook group that has been put together in the hopes of organizing people to help with this in any way. It is my modest suggestion that you join it.
Not only is it unnecessary for me to elaborate on this, but I am severely unqualified to do so. I will, in respect to the urgency and seriousness of this matter (if that’s needed at all, in this case), leave you with a snippet from the Kalamazoo Gazette article I linked to above:
“I just came from Fort Custer and you can smell it now,” Kalamazoo County Undersheriff Pali Matyas said. “… It’s all rolling downhill and there are a lot of complications.”
Let us hope this has a timely and safe resolution.
DITKalamazoo 
On Monday night (July 26) an oil pipeline – owned by Enbridge Energy Inc. – burst and spilled over 1,000,000+ gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River near Battle Creek, Michigan. Michiganders are scrambling to stop the flow from getting into Lake Michigan, but I fear their efforts are in vain.
According to the latest local news reports, it seems that Enbridge was slow to react to the emergency, while under reporting the actual amount of oil that was leaked into the river. Since Monday, the situation has grown even worse. Birds and other animal wildlife, coated with oil, have been found. People living along the river have been warned to evacuate the area along the river way and not to drink their well water for fear of contamination.
1,000,000+ gallons of oil may not sound like much to some, considering the amount of oil now floating just underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, but in such a confined area – like the Kalamazoo River – that amount is devastating. As the oil continues to flow west, it will soon reach Lake Michigan, affecting the drinking water of millions of people, killing all wildlife, and despoiling the true beauty of the great lake.
I’m really starting to believe that corporations don’t give a damn about anything other than their profits. As I stated in one of my previous blog posts (Who Put Corporations in Charge?), “…what good is money, after all, if you don’t have air to breathe, water to drink, or food to eat without fear of contamination?”