Karen Weaver's Fight for Clean Water November 2017 | Page 41
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS
As the 64-year-old Enbridge Line 5 pipeline winds its way through Michigan, from
Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario it threatens 645-miles of Michigan’s rivers,
lands, wetlands, lake and The Great Lakes. Line 5 has spilled at least 1.13 million
gallons of oil in 29 incidents since 1968, just in Michigan. Nationwide, Enbridge
has had over 800 leaks since 1999, releasing more than 6,781,950 gallons into the
environment. From 2002- 2012, pipeline detection technology only caught 5 percent
of spills in the U.S.
Line 5 runs five miles through the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and
Lake Huron meet. Enbridge Energy says it’s pressure tested the structural integrity
of Line Five beneath the Straits and the results appear to show the oil and gas
pipeline does not pose a serious threat to the Great Lakes. However, Enbridge is the
same company that shut off alarms for 17 hours, allowing almost a million gallons of
tar sands oil to spill into the Kalamazoo River in June 2010. Seventeen hours after
alarms alerted them there was a problem, before they responded to a spill that
became the biggest inland oil disaster in U.S. history. During that 17 hours, Enbridge
restarted the pipeline twice, pumping more oil through the broken line. Once
Enbridge did respond, the NTSB likened their response to “Keystone Cops”,
ineffectual because of lack of equipment and trained manpower to respond quickly.
CONT’D