It was national news in Canada.
I heard about in Australiaon CNN, but filed under just another ecological disaster by a money grabbing oil company who lives under poor government oversite and regulation. There are so many disasters today that unless it happens in your backyard people just don’t care. Disaster Fatigue I call it.
Yeah, and we heard about it as soon as it happened, courtesy of CBC Newschannel.
As a Canadian, I apologize for this. But I do hear that the company involved is doing what it can to clean up the mess, as well as buying all affected houses for fair market value.
Agreed. I heard about it two days ago (that is, two days as measured from the OP’s date of posting.) Seriously, nobody in the US heard about it before now?
I wasn’t aware of it, I’m from Chicago with no cable TV. It’s even worse as it affects fresh water and there is far less of that to go around.
Another Chicago reporting here. I heard it on the radio and read it in the Sun-Times sometime the last week of July. Also, there was a Mayor Daley soundbite where he said something like “oil is worse than carp,” comparing the Michigan oil spill to the Asian carp problem. I don’t recall it being a front-page story, though.
Michigan what now?
I’ve been moving and don’t have TV hooked up yet, nor have I seen the story on the front page of Yahoo or Fark, where I have been getting the vast majority of my news since the move. This is the first I’ve heard of it.
Canadian news is quite international, because other than hockey, not much happens here. 
So, yeah, if you watch/read/listen to the news you’ve heard about it since day one.
Although an environmental disaster is an environmental disaster, this oil spill is not as newsworthy as the one in the Gulf, so I would not expect the same level of media coverage, and I would not expect the same level of public awareness.
Although fish are being killed, there is no fishing (or shrimping) industry being affected. Although there are waterfowl being killed, there is no shortage of Canada Geese. The spill is containable rather than dispersed. The leak was stopped rather than continuing for a long time. Although a river is being polluted, the watercourse downstream of the spill is already so polluted that it is a Superfund site.
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703578104575397613818891740.html
Now we know that another thing it has in common with the gulf spill . The company ignored the rules and did not inspect the pipes . The EPA warned them that it should be done . The company has been cited for violation numerous times.
Nobody in the media’s pointed this out yet, but I think that Daley’s oil vs carp comment is a big immature “so there” type of shot at Michigan, because Michigan is filing a lawsuit to force Daley to permanently cut off the sanitation canal through which the Asian Carp can enter Lake Michigan.
That’s exactly the context the Sun-Times reported it in.
The quote really doesn’t make much sense in any other context.
Buckeye (n) A hairless nut of little value.
I happened to be in the west side of Michigan when the story broke, of course that was THE news story. Luckily, they were able to stop it before it got to Lake Michigan (which I might add has the finest beach sand in the world).
I give the company some props for offering to buy affected homes for full value. If it was on the market before the spill, they’ll give you what you asked for. I guess if you happened to have had it on the market and you asked for a lot more than you would really have taken, you made out pretty well.
Obligatory Onion article:
Thousands Lose Jobs As Michigan Unemployment Offices Close 
Never mind the oil spill, I think most of the nation is only dimly aware of the existence of Michigan at all. We’ve had major episodes of severe weather here this summer, but national news outlets don’t breathe a word of it until the same damn weather system bombards the east coast.
The entire stretch of the kalamazoo is off limits to fishing until further notice,and yes that is affecting small businesses. The environmental damage to wildlife is not limited to muskrats and geese, we have endangered turtles, amphibians, wading birds, fish, crustaceans, other mammals that depend on the river system. And I beg your pardon, but the superfund sites are the bottomlands where PCB sedimets remain. The water that flows id relatively clean and has been getting cleaner with every year.
The fact that Enbridge wants to buy out property sounds good, until I think about what will happen to that property once it’s in their hands, what then? Private property rights and all that, maybe they won’t feel like restoring their streambanks to the way they were before they were oiled up.
I would not equate the severity of this spill with the Asian carp threat, for the effects of this spill can be remediated, whereas once the Asian carp are established, they and their effects will be there to stay.