Striking similarities to the Gulf Coast oil spill are turning up in the investigation of the broken pipeline that leaked into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.
Here's an excerpt:
n the Summer of the Spill, history is already repeating itself, this time in Michigan.
An oil spill in the Kalamazoo River has set off a small-scale reenactment of the Gulf of Mexico's drama in farm country 100 miles west of Detroit. The villain is different: a broken pipeline, not a blown-out well. The oily birds are Canada geese, not pelicans.
But other plot points are eerily similar: A large company with safety violations. Regulators who didn't act fast enough. Claims centers. Containment boom. Broken equipment that everybody's waiting to examine.
And now, questions about how much of the oil is gone and how much is just unaccounted for.
"The pattern that we see here is a pattern of inadequate oversight and supervision [in government] and an industry that appears to cut corners," said the National Wildlife Federation's Tim Warman, who helped write a report documenting hundreds of accidents in the oil and gas industry in the past decade.
It went to the printer last month, two days before the Michigan spill began.
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