Susan Connolly lives in Marshall, a picturesque small town in southern Michigan. The highlights of the year in Marshall are usually the Labor Day historic home tour and the annual Christmas Parade. On July 25, 2010, though, an oil company called Enbridge spilled more than a million gallons of toxic tar sands crude from a pipeline into Talmadge Creek, just a few miles from Susan's house. As the spill spread to the Kalamazoo River, Susan, her husband, and their two small children could smell the fumes from their home the next morning. But it wasn't until later that night that they realized something was seriously wrong:

My husband and I dropped off our children and headed to work. We still didn't know anything was going on. We just knew there was an odor in the air. When we picked up the children that evening, people were talking about something strange going on. The spill was now on the news. But nothing official, no warnings. That evening, my son was throwing up. My daughter, within a few days of the spill, developed a strange rash. My daughter was only two, and my son was four-and-a-half.

Children and staff were getting sick ...

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Coming Clean is the blog of Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.