The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of [Kindle Edition]

Elizabeth McGowan (Author), Lisa Song (Author), David Hasemyer (Author), Susan White (Editor), Catherine Mann (Illustrator)

Book Description

InsideClimate News won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for this four-part narrative and six follow-up reports into an oil spill most Americans have never heard of. More than 1 million gallons of oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River in July 2010, triggering the most expensive cleanup in U.S. history -- more than 3/4 of a billion dollars -- and after almost two years the cleanup still isn’t finished. Why not? Because the underground pipeline that ruptured was carrying diluted bitumen, or dilbit, the dirtiest, stickiest oil used today. It’s the same kind of oil that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline could someday carry across the nation’s largest drinking water aquifer. Written as a narrative, this page-turner takes an inside look at what happened to two families, a community, unprepared agencies and an inept company during an environmental disaster involving a new kind of oil few people know much about.

Product Details

• File Size: 1170 KB
• Print Length: 71 pages
• Publisher: InsideClimate News (June 24, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B008EKH5F6
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #879 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Energy
  • #1 in Books > Science & Math > Environment
  • #1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Oil madness: the shape of things to come June 25, 2012

By Osha Gray Davidson

Amazon Verified Purchase

In our obsession to wring every last drop of oil from the earth -- whatever the costs -- we've polluted the air, fouled the ocean, sacrificed workers' lives, and altered the climate. If the Keystone XL pipeline is built, that list of horribles will include dilbit disasters. I had never heard the word "dilbit" before reading this short but intense and moving chronicle of a 2010 incident in which a pipeline carrying tar sands from Canada burst in Michigan. More than one million gallons of "diluted bitumen," or "dilbit" as it's know in the trade, poured into the Kalamazoo River. The authors have done a wonderful job of showing how the event affected not just the river and surrounding lands, but the people and communities nearby. Scary stuff, made even scarier when you consider that the mega-project, the Keystone XL, will supersize disasters like the one recounted in this book.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing story June 25, 2012

By Dave

This is an amazing story of North America's biggest dilbit pipeline spill and how it affected the lives of people living in a tightknit town in Southwestern Michigan.

It's a story about a flawed response that endangered people, exposed the shortcoming of pipeline regulations and showed how ill-prepared we are to deal with this type of spill.

The story makes you smell the horrendous smell of the oily sludge that covered front yards and fouled creeks and rivers. It makes you feel the fright and confusion of people living along Talmadge Creek whose lives were forever changed by that ruptured pipeline.

It makes you angry at the initial Enbridge response-- from calling their public relations people before alerting authorities, to downplaying the severity of the spill. It exposes just how unprepared everyone was, from small town officials to federal regulators to Enbridge itself.

It raises the question of "how could this happen?" And more importantly makes you wonder if it can happen again.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Big Oil Makes a big mess June 25, 2012

By Brooklyn Bob

As Stephen Colbert explained, the news media can only overplay one story at a time. The corollary is that when one story dominates the news, others are underplayed, lost in the media scramble. That's what happened in 2010 when a Michigan pipeline burst and spilled a million gallons of a particularly stinky, sticky form of oil -- called "dilbit" -- in the Kalamazoo River. But that spill didn't get much attention at the time, because the nation was focused on the massive BP spill that had recently caused a catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

But the dilbit cleanup is still going on, and a story that big can't stay a secret forever. So, thanks to InsideClimateNews.org, the story is out at last in this new Kindle book, "The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of." A team of reporters and editors spent months on the story, and the result is a fascinating, horrifying tale of people driven from their homes and businesses, blackened rivers and creeks, of corporate secrecy just when openness was most needed, and of heroic efforts to rid the environment of a pestilence that simply refuses to go away.