Unchecked gas and oil exploration have had a profound negative impact on the greater Au Sable region in recent years. Anglers’ has taken on the Department of Natural Resources and private businesses that have failed to control exploration and production concerns that have allowed pollution of soil, air, ground water – and even the surface water of the Au Sable and its headwaters.

Unfettered exploration corralled

In 1992, a grassroots organization, the Michigan Environmental Trust Limited (METL), brought suit against some of these companies and the Department of Natural Resources seeking to reduce stream sedimentation and forest fragmentation. The Anglers and Trout Unlimited joined the suit. Legal expenses, expert witnesses, environmental consultants and miscellaneous expenses far exceeded $100,000.

In December 1992, Ingham County Judge Carolyn Stell issued a temporary injunction effective in the five hardest hit counties. The injunction provided that all pipeline stream crossings in those counties were to be made by boring beneath the streambeds rather than by plowing or trenching across the streambed surface. Judge Stell also ordered the DNR to produce an environmental impact statement that showed gas development was a significant source of trout stream pollution by sedimentation.

In late 1994 a compromise was reached regarding requiring that wells be spaced 80 acres apart, double the old distance.

Kolka Creek kept pure

In the early 2000s, the state approved a permit to allow Merit Energy to dump contaminated oil drilling fluids into Kolka Creek, an important tributary in the headwaters of the Au Sable. Anglers stepped up to fight the discharge, taking legal action that resulted in withdrawal of the state’s approval and protection of the creek – and the river.

Protecting the South Branch from oil development

In 2013, Anglers became aware that the state Department of Natural Resources was going to allow oil and gas companies to bid for leases on land interspersed throughout the heart of the Au Sable [River], its Holy Water. A third of those parcels were designated to allow the construction of production facilities and the installation of drilling rigs, storage tanks, compressors, and the other equipment necessary for oil and gas production.

Anglers went to work to protect this special piece of Michigan. We twice asked the DNR to remove the parcels from the October mineral rights auction; the DNR sided with the oil industry. We used our members to make sure the DNR, Natural Resources Commission, Department of Environmental Quality and Governor’s office were aware of their mistake, and raised the issue with other groups and news media around the state.

We partnered Michigan Trout Unlimited (plus two local chapters), the Sierra Club, Michigan League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Michigan Environmental Council, and the Au Sable Big Water Preservation Association were all on board. In the end 17 groups, businesses and governmental bodies signed on to a letter opposing the leases in a letter sent to top government officials in late 2013.

Thousands of emails and letters flooded into the DNR director, and in the end, the department backed down. Anglers – and its many members and friends – had protected the Au Sable once again.