MARSHALL, MICHIGAN -- (Marketwire) -- 08/16/10 -- Excerpt from Joint News Conference, 3 p.m. Eastern Time, August 16, 2010 Marshall, Michigan.

Patrick Daniel, President & CEO, Enbridge Inc.

We continue to make very good progress on clean-up at the leak site and also along Talmadge Creek. We're now well underway with clean-up on the Kalamazoo River as well, as indicated in the earlier call. Cooperation of all the agencies continues to be outstanding on this response and clean-up.

Soil scraping along the shores of Talmadge Creek is ongoing and it's necessary because of the high water at the time of the leak. So those who observe that level of scraping, that is why that has occurred.

I was on the river yesterday and there was considerable shore clean-up activity underway at the time. The river water itself is looking very good at this point.

We continue to work closely with the most impacted residents, particularly those along Talmadge Creek. We've purchased two homes, as I indicated in our last call, and we've conducted appraisals on approximately six other homes.

The number of inconvenience claims being presented at our Battle Creek and Marshall Claim Centers has declined significantly from a week ago. The offices remain open from eight a.m. to eight p.m. Over the weekend Battle Creek processed 48 claims and Marshall processed another 29 claims.

We're very pleased that the voluntary evacuation is now partially lifted for 70 per cent of the residents and some of the people who chose to evacuate in that area will be back into their homes soon.

We very much appreciate the patience of those residents who still have the noise and disruption of the shoreline remediation crews and also the collection points. Most of that heavy equipment disruption should be in decline by the end of this month, especially in the Talmadge Creek area.

And as I mentioned earlier, a lot has been accomplished on the river regarding clean-up. We still have much more to do and once again I want to thank the community. We have been overwhelmed by the cooperation and support of this community and we very much appreciate that.

Steve Wuori, Executive Vice President, Liquids Pipelines, Enbridge Pipelines Inc.

Just a couple of things this afternoon. First on the spill site itself: we visited there earlier today and now that the gross contamination has virtually all been removed we're working on secondary soil scraping as we work on the final clean-up of that site. Also we're now performing both soil surface and boring testing of the soils in that area to ensure that it's clean.

Mark Durno gave quite a bit of detail about the clean-up progress along the river so I won't add to that other than to echo Pat's comments about the progress there.

In regard to the pipeline, on Friday Enbridge re-filed the Pipeline Return to Service Plan as required with the Office of Pipeline Safety. The original plan and also the plan that we filed on Friday detailed the measures in place to insure that the restart of Line 6B will be completed safely. That plan is now with the Office of Pipeline Safety for their review and we look forward to their response.

Enbridge has launched a website to provide updates and further information about the Company's response to the leak on the 6B pipeline near Marshall, Michigan. The URL for the website is response.enbridgeus.com.