Recently three separate articles have appeared in the Bangor Daily News concerning tar sands oil and the possible use of the present pipeline that runs between Portland, Maine, and Montreal, known as the Portland Pipe Line.
One article mentioned that the Montreal Pipe Line Ltd. and the Enbridge Corp. could decide jointly to reverse the flow of oil and use the Portland to Montreal pipeline to pump tar sands from Montreal to Portland. It did not mention what it would take to stop such a project.
The opinion piece by John Hinck mentioned that a bad situation occurred along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010. The line ruptured, spilling almost one million gallons of tar sands oil in rivers, streams, lakes and over land. He forgot a couple of important points.
What none of these articles mentions is two facts that scare me. Fact one: The Enbridge line in Michigan was more than 40 years old. Fact two: Tar sands oil is heavier than crude.
My father started work for the Portland Pipe Line in 1941, working with the survey crew that laid out the right of way for the pipeline. He then worked in one of the pumping stations along the line, eventually becoming the supervisor of the line from Portland to the Canadian border.
The 12-inch line was laid in 1941. It has been filled with nitrogen and abandoned. The 18-inch line went online in 1950. It also has been filled with nitrogen but not abandoned. In 1965, the 24-inch line started pumping crude northward. My point is, however, that the pipes that belong to the Portland Pipe Line Co. are in excess of 40 years old; the 24-inch line will be 50 years old in 2015 and the 18-inch line is 62 years old.
If a 40-year-old line ruptured, I would imagine an even older line might do the same thing. And as John Hinck mentioned, this pipeline crosses the Androscoggin, the Crooked, and the Presumpscot rivers and lies close to Sebago lake. Picture some heavy tar sands oil in those rivers and in Sebago. The thought is not pleasant.
I remember a break in the Portland Pipeline when I was a kid. My dad rushed to the scene and commandeered the crews who had practiced for just such an incident. He was there night and day while the crews got the spill contained within a floating barrier and then sucked up the crude oil. It was a very minor break. I don’t know the number of gallons. The bottom line is that the spill was contained. It did not get into any waterways and it was totally cleaned up within a week or so.
Crude oil is not gooey or gummy, but rather it is lighter than water and floats on the surface.
Tar sands oil, as I have heard on the radio and read in the press, is gooey, gummy and heavy. It does not react to water the way crude does. Tar sands oil sinks. No one knows how to get the tar sands oil off the bottom of streams and rivers. Tar sands oil cannot be contained with a floating barrier. There is no way to contain the stuff.
Crude oil is a sweet, slightly waxy oil. A “pig” runs through the lines on a regular basis to scrape the wax off the inside perimeter of the lines. Tar sands oil is corrosive and is often described as a hot sandpaper coursing through the lines. Somehow I feel that lines that are approximately 50 years old cannot stand the corrosiveness of tar sands oil nor the coarseness.
Mike Mullen in the Land Division of Maine’s DEP said if Montreal Pipeline Ltd. and Enbridge Corp. decide to pump tar sands oil through Maine and to replace or upgrade any lines or pumping stations, the Department of Environmental Protection would need to issue permits due to the Natural Resources Protection Act. This act provides that any construction near ponds, streams and wetlands is permitted before the start of construction. When asked what action could be taken to stop any flow of corrosive tar sands oil through existing lines without any changes or upgrades to line or pumping stations, Mullen stated he believed a bill would have to be passed by the Maine Legislature.
Allowing these tar sands oils to course through aging lines that run through our state is a mistake. The folks in Michigan can tell you about the horrors of a rupture in a line carrying tar sands oil. Perhaps the legislature should send a small delegation of legislators and citizens out to the area of the rupture along the Kalamazoo River to learn firsthand the dangers of allowing such folly to occur in our great state of Maine.
Merrylyn Sawyer spent much of her career working with Cianbro Corp. She also taught technology at the middle school level.
No Problem!
All you gotta do if she leaks is spend a couple hundred dollars in speedy dry and 5 million in adds to convince people that its all cleaned up!
There is always a self-proclaimed “expert” projecting some imagined disaster to frighten people out of economic development on behalf of the viro anti-industrial revolution. This viro activist, who has worked for Restore but does not mention her ideology in her propaganda, claims expertise from having “worked with” Cianbro Corp. and taught “technology” in “middle school”. We are supposed to believe that her envirochondria is worth more than pipeline engineers, whom she imagines are ignorantly unaware of what must be done to maintain and operate a pipeline. It “scares” her. We are supposed to forget that the viros’ sweeping demands to shut down industrial civilization on behalf of primitive wilderness “utopia” is far more dangerous to the lives and well-being of all of us than any possible industrial accident.
Just call or go to
Kalamazoo or read about it and have an open mind as to do we want to risk that type of devastation for a few dollars and this crap going into a ship to go somewhere to be refined and shipped to god only knows where?
As far as I am concerned Canada can keep their tar sands oil.
Industrial energy production and free trade are necessities for civilization. They are not “crap”. Envirochondriac fear-mongering and the intended stifling prohibitions of the anti-industrial revolution are the biggest threat of “devastation”.
I guess our environment is nothing to worry about, what the heck a few fish die, the water is good for nothing, a couple of ponds die, but by god we have made it possible for our oil companies to make more money and somebody some where can run their cars for another year. Great plan!
This polemic is nonresponsive to what has been written here but continues to be revealing. Oil companies earn money because they provide value to all of us — the energy and many other chemical products required to maintain modern civilization. Vhiwater is an ideological viro who disparages human values and doesn’t care that he would stop people’s cars from running — and a lot more — over “a couple of ponds and a few fish” as he further imagines the disappearance of all water we need in order to add to the-sky-is-falling hyperbole.
Ok I see you don’t mind if the pipes happen to break and pollute the water say for Portland, well at least I know where you stand. Products to market at any cost. Some fine day you will say what was I thinking when a major disaster occurs. The sky is not falling but it sure as hell could very easily if we let companies do whatever they want to with them saying trust us we know what we are doing. How did the banks do in 2007, BP in 2009 and Enbridge in 2010?
It is time to check and double check on these “trust me companies”.
You still evade responding to what I wrote. No one is advocating industrial accidents or letting everyone literally “do whatever they want”.
“There is always a self-proclaimed “expert” projecting some imagined disaster to frighten people out of economic development on behalf of the viro anti-industrial revolution. ”
So you are OK with the idea of the city of Portland losing it’s supply of drinking water should the pipeline rupture where it crosses the Crooked River?
The sky is falling. Ban industry in the name of safety.
I don’t see a self proclaimed expert but instead someone who knows a little and is worried by what she knows. What I also see is someone who is awfully quick to believe the pipeline engineers with more than a little motivation to find tar sands and Maine’s pipeline to be a perfectly safe mix. Having read about Michigan’s tar sand spill (ruptured pipe referenced in the above article) I’m inclined to err on the side of safety. It’s not “just” the environment but also the drinking water supply for hundreds of thousands of Mainers. Although they frequently go overboard, sometimes those environmentalists are right….
The weatherman who always says it will rain is “sometimes right”, too, with no connection between reality and his predictions and no reason to believe him because “maybe this time he’s right”. The author if this article has a long record as a viro activist, now pretending to have engineering expertise. That it sometimes does in fact rain is not cause for hysteria over the weather.
A byline simply provides some background on the writer; it does not “imply” any expertise. The paper requires a byline and many papers require more than a line or two.
The description of her background clearly was skewed to imply that she has technical expertise in the field as opposed to her viro agenda and background.
Perhaps you neglected to notice that the piece was written as an ‘Opinion’ piece. It did not appear under ‘Politics’ nor under ‘Business’. You are certainly welcome, I’m sure, to submit your own ‘Opinion’ piece. You certainly are not short on opinions.
“Perhaps you neglected to notice [sniff sniff]” that the content of the article, which is what is discussed here, does not change by calling it an “opinion piece instead of “appearing under business or politics”.
Your inability to comprehend the potential for problems in operating this outdated system under conditions far beyond its designed capacity for temperature and pressure speaks volumes. You have consistently exhibited a myopic and monochromatic view of the world where nothing one party does can possibly affect anyone else. Reality does not conform to your narrow-minded opinions.
This “earthling” creature has a record of personal invective and smears substituting for responsive posts. No one — no one — has said that there is no ‘potential for problems’ using this or any other pipeline. No one has said that ‘nothing we do can possibly affect’ anyone else.
Much of engineering consists largely of identifying and solving problems, which include analyzing, testing, rebuilding where necessary, and avoiding problems leading to liability for external damage to others. No one in a pipeline conversion of this magnitude is simply going to ‘throw the switch’ to reverse a flow and do nothing else.
For envirochondriacs like the “earthling” — whose technical understanding consists of fears and parroting words like “temperature” and “pressure” — to pompously tell us that we are all stupid, without “comprehension”, and need them to tell the rest of what to do is both ignorant and presumptuous. But they not only claim to identify “potential problems” they ridiculously assume no one has thought about, they demand to forcibly ban the project based on their fears and a goal of “protecting nature” from human civilization, posing as engineering advice.
Viros want their own bureaucracy to rule everyone else in a system under which we can only take even normal action by advance government permission, which permission is intended to be denied based on fear and preservationism — with “nature” regarded as an intrinsic value superseding human values as they denounce human values as “narrow minded” and not “conforming” to their “reality”. Their sweeping anti-industrial revolution is far more dangerous to human life and values than a potential for an industrial accident. Humanity will not conform to the “earthling” creature’s religious nature-worship it demands to force down our throats.
You can say more about nothing than anyone I have ever read. earthling did not shove anything down anyone’s throat. Be a man and answer the questions that 4mermainer asked you. If you can answer them correctly, maybe someone will care to read your comments which so far are a lot of angry ramblings about nothing at all.
Your inability to comprehend what I write because of your ideologically self-imposed limitations on your thinking are your problem. Others can see the contrast and understand that another viro attack attempting to prohibit a pipeline project is not about “nothing at all”.
Earthling advocates government force to impose his misanthropic preservationism. He has been doing this for a long time, including in comments on news articles for all to see. That is his attempt to shove his religious nature worship down our throats.
4mermainer’s “questions” are a nonresponsive, irrelevant diversion for reasons explained many times throughout these comments, including directly in response to him. No one has to “answer his questions” to see that neither they nor the article justifies the political conclusion to prohibit the project.
The only personal invective and smears in my conversations with you have come from you, directed at me, as exemplified in your post above. You have consistently referred to me as less than human, as a “terrorist”, and as advocating governmental violence against landowners, without a single shred of evidence that I advocate any such position. You rant and rave against anything that approaches responsible stewardship of natural resources. You are probably the angriest person I have ever interacted with, and one of the most misinformed. Your continued use of terms like “viro” are pathetic attempts to demonize anyone whose viewpoint disagrees with your own. You are cast in the same mold as the tea-partiers and “dittoheads” who refuse to compromise on any issue and think a conversation consists of shouting down the opposition while blocking their ears. Good luck getting anywhere in life with that attitude, you’re going to need it.
Yet another rant from the “earthling” in a long line of such personal invective in his diatribes as he makes things up about his targets.
Wow. You’ve sure got an ax to grind, don’t you?
Obstructionism from the viro lobby in its own “ax to grind” has and still is doing a lot of damage to the economy and to our lives. The author has the “ax to grind” in her demand to prohibit the pipeline project.
Erich Vehyl always has an ax to grind. Google him.
Heil Yates. Opposition smeared as nothing but an “ax to grind” vill not be considered for its content or tolerated.
Erich – you could just write this again to the author of this article. Looks as if you’ve been spewing the same old rhetoric for years. Here’s a little bit of the same socialism line you were writing in 2003 (more can be read at: http://www.asmainegoes.com/content/erich-veyhl-ecosocialism )
“We cannot “artificially” produce energy supplementing primitivemuscle-power on the industrial scale required for advanced human life ifthe logging of trees, the mining of coal and uranium and the drilling ofnatural gas and oil, as well as the production and delivery of energy inthe form in which we use it, are prohibited on principle everywhere theviros can get away with it for the sake of yet another “unique” area in a”natural”, “pristine environment”. But that is now almost everywhere inthe US. Their rhetoric misleads a gullible public into thinking that everybarren, forsaken area they want to preserve from man’s “artificialtampering” is the Grand Canyon. To their anti-human, nature worshippingminds, everything is the Grand Canyon, not to be touched except bywilderness hikers.The energy we use does not fall out of the sky for free, but if it did, theviros would oppose our “unnatural” use of that, too.”Posted as part of a diatribe on: ‘As Maine Goes’, written by Erich Vehyl, independent computer software professional from Boston and land activist when he’s in Lubec, Maine.
If you want to quote something from the past, provide the actual source so people can see for themselves what it says and in what context, don’t mix statements up with your own sneering personal venom, and get your facts straight. Also recognize that the viro agenda is not immune from principled opposition from anyone and that opposition is not refuted by citing it as rejection of your ideology. Opposition to your political agenda is not wrong because it is opposition. You are not the “idealist” immune from criticism you pretend to be.
Is this the same Merrylyn Sawyer who works for the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine?
Apparently so, or was. Despite the attempted implication in the article, she has no engineering background:
“Merrylyn Sawyer graduated from the University of Maine with a wildlife degree. She has worked for various conservation-minded organizations: Nature Conservancy, RESTORE: The North Woods and the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.” From: http://www.kjonline.com/opinio… She was an “office manager” (secretarial work) at the radical pressure group Restore for years.
But she wrote last June that she lost her non-profit office job and had become destitute: http://savemerrylynshome.blogs…
Whatever she is doing now she has no technical engineering credibility.
I have seen you discredit the individual who wrote this article, but not once did I see you see you dispute what she said in the article. Is tar sand heavier then crude oil? Is it gummy and will it sink to the bottom of a body of water? Can it be contained with a boom? Does the presence of sand in the mixture act similar to sand paper or emery cloth? Is the pipeline the age she claims it is? Does the material it is made from deteriorate over time? Have similar pipelines, especially of this age, sprung leaks? If so what was the cost of the clean up both in terms of dollars and damage to the environment. I actually know the answers to those questions but would love to hear you tell us all about your vast knowledge when it comes to pipelines. Oh by the way I hold two degrees from the University of Maine, both in mechanical engineering and have been a registered engineer for over 30 years.
The author of the article discredited herself with disingenuous implications of an expertise she does not possess, employed to concoct credibility for a viro agenda to kill another pipeline in a fear campaign. Her presumptuous conclusion to ban the project does not follow from a laundry list of claimed “killer” details about the pipeline conversion. Did you tell her what to include in her article or write it for her? If you are not just kibitzing from a related field within ME and have relevant experience and proper and honest motives then do some real good by offering your services as a consultant to those responsible for the project instead of in the name of “mechanical engineering” defending the viro agenda to ban another pipeline.
I notice you spewed a lot of rhetoric but I fail to see where you answered any of the questions I asked. I did not write the article nor did I attempt to defend anything in the article. What I did was ask you a question, several in fact and as yet I fail to see where you have answered any of them . As far as offering my services to the company involved in the pipeline is concerned I am sure they have plenty of consultants available to them already. Plus we are buried in work to the point that we are not taking on any projects at this time.
You ignore what you want in the name of “spewed rhetoric” so you can evade responding to it. No one here has to “answer your questions” to your satisfaction. Your demands for anyone here to “answer questions” on a subject that is being dealt with by engineers and management who are responsible for the project and how to successfully implement it are an irrelevant diversion. You don’t decide whether the conversion process can be allowed. The author’s political conclusions do not follow from what either she or you wrote.
You’ve got to be kidding. Tell me it’s not true, that she doesn’t work for SAM.
Is this the same Erich Vehyl who works in Boston and sometimes lives in Maine? Do you suppose msscv that Erich uses as a pseudonym could stand for Massachusetts social conservative? Hmmmmm……. Whatever he is doing now he has no xxxxx credibility. (sentence edited to make msscv relax for a minute. )
Erich: Can’t you see that this is a take-off from what you wrote to Billly_The_Mountain? I was using the same format as you did about the author. chill out. Take those hot hands off the keyboard and relax for a minute. Maybe you’ll even get a laugh or two out some of this if you just ‘chilled ‘ for a few minutes. Although that may be tough sitting in a lofty high-rise in Boston or in a farm house in Concord – wherever.
Opposition to your political agenda is not grounds to conclude that anyone has “no moral credibility”. Neither is the stuff you and your cronies make up about people in your venomous, personal smears dishonestly intended to personally demonize your enemies to destroy their “credibility”, which is libel. Saul Alinsky would be proud of you but you are no moral idealist.
Use your brains people….do you really think the goal of pipeline companies is to invest billions of dollars to transport material that will destroy their infrastructure and put them out of business??? The stuff that comes out of ground is not what goes through the pipeline. There are very strict specifications designed to protect these long-lived assets. I’m pretty sure investors would insist on that.
Normal people can understand what you have written, but we are dealing with political ideologues who have a view of the world in which engineers don’t care about building things that work, management has no concern for what is accomplished and the ensuing reputation, investors will throw their own money into a pit with no concern for potential losses, and there is no legal system ensuring accountability for damage to others. And more, the viros have a different standard of success based on their vision of nature preservation and prevention of the “human footprint”, which goes far beyond the matter of industrial accidents — The worst of them would prefer to not have pipelines at all. They are power seekers who demand ultimate control for themselves over everything and everyone around them. They want a bureaucracy that meddles in everything and can prevent anything without advance permission from a government bureaucracy, which they fully intend to withhold whenever they feel like it. This has been the progressively growing trend in Maine government agencies for decades.