Wear This, Enbridge

"Trust Us."   That's the theme behind Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline PR campaign.   The company is desperate to get the public convinced they're trustworthy.   They're pros, they know what they're doing, they can handle any pipeline problems that come their way.  Bollocks.

At some point Enbridge is going to have to wear its own record and that is pretty dismal.   A good deal of attention has been focused on the company's bitumen spill in a river near Kalamazoo, Michigan.   Did Enbridge react quickly enough?   Did it effectively clean up the mess it created?

A new report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has reset the whole Kalamazoo issue.   The NTSB has found that Enbridge knew, five years in advance, that its pipeline was beset with corrosion and cracking problems.   FIVE YEARS.   Enbridge had half a decade to deal with known problems and it didn't.   And that was in Michigan, not many hundreds of miles of rocky wilderness across northern Alberta and northern British Columbia, the Northern Gateway route.

Yes, Enbridge knows what they're doing.   That's the problem.