Enbridge Inc. is settling a four-year class action suit by paying $6.75 million to people who lived and owned property near its Line 6B pipeline when it dumped more than 800,000 gallons of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River.
The tentative agreement involves “thousands of plaintiffs who claimed they were subject to toxic fumes, noise, and general degradation of life following the July 2010 oil spill,” Climate Progress reports.
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“The lawsuit itself is far from the only time Enbridge has had to shell out cash for the historic spill, which caused many local residents to permanently relocate in the wake of toxic fumes and the difficulty in cleanup,” Atkin writes.
“Indeed, the difficulty in cleaning up tar sands oil—which is thicker and more sludgy than conventional oil—made it the most expensive inland oil spill in U.S. history,” with Enbridge covering about $1.2 billion in cleanup costs.
