Pipeline messes fail to inspire confidence

Just in time for Earth Day, the company that only recently began skewering Ohio with a $4 billion natural-gas pipeline has racked up a brace of environmental blunders.

Or maybe, as the Rover Pipeline suggests, it’s Earth’s fault.

Rover reported to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency that it had an “inadvertent release” of about 2 million gallons of drilling mud into a Stark County wetland on April 13,

and another one of 50,000 or so gallons into a Richland County wetland a day later.

The mud, a mixture of water and bentonite clay, is used as a lubricant in drilling.

Rover’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas, stressed in an occasionally redundant but expertly spun email that bentonite clay is “naturally occurring,” “nontoxic” and “safe.”

“There will be no impact to the environment,” it reads. Bentonite clay, the statement notes, “is used in a variety of household products.”

Which is true. Among its uses, bentonite clay puts the clump in clumping cat litter.

But this misstep involved more than a cat box’s worth of bentonite clay. The clay sludge in question could fill three Olympic swimming pools.

Here’s how the company says it happened:

“Due to the subsurface conditions and other environmental conditions of the locations, the drilling mud was able to migrate through naturally occurring fractures in the soils and reach the surface.”

So Earth did it, in cahoots with the environment.

No one should be surprised that construction of the pipeline, which started only recently, has led to screwups. Rover has not hidden the fact that it is in a hurry.

Corporate attorneys argued this year in U.S. District Court that Rover had to make haste. The company needed permission to cut trees along the pipeline’s path ASAP because endangered bats would soon awaken from their winter slumber and begin roosting in trees. Rover had to finish its tree-cutting before April 1, or the project would be forced to endure a costly delay until the bats left the trees and returned to hibernation in the fall.

Hemorrhaging a few million gallons of muck into some wetlands is one thing. Hemorrhaging money is quite another.

Once finished, the pipeline will slice through 713 miles of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The larger of the two spills coated 500,000 square feet of a wetland beside the Tuscarawas River, or about the area taken up by five WalMart stores.

James Lee, a spokesman for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, said both spills were contained. The EPA issued two violations that allege the sludge “coated the area with a layer of mud and impacted water quality.” There was no health threat, he said.

“Ohio EPA will consider possible fines and other penalties after the cleanup is complete,” Lee said Friday.

Even assuming that Energy Transfer is right and the impact to the environment is zero, the incidents don’t instill confidence in a company that pledges to “safely and reliably transport” 3.25 billion cubic feet of flammable natural gas each day.

I asked Alexis Daniel, a company spokeswoman, why Ohioans should trust that pledge, given the sloppy start.

The email statement was all I got.

In an earlier email, she had said, “(We) anticipate returning to construction shortly.”

Of course they do. Come hell or fouled water.