I think, as Detroit Blight Busters founder John George does, that Mayor Mike Duggan has mostly done a remarkable job as mayor. I also understand wanting to leave the legacy of Devil’s Night and the bad old days behind. But I think canceling Angels’ Night and assuming that everything will automatically be all right is a very dangerous thing to do.
Mayor Dennis Archer tried that one year back in the 1990s, with disastrous results. But there’s something else going on in Michigan that isn’t very visible in Detroit, but which amounts to a dangerous power grab that could endanger the lives of everyone in this state and beyond.
It involves the infamous oil-carrying twin pipelines together known as Line 5, which snake along for five miles on the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac, between Lakes Huron and Michigan. They have been there for 65 years, and the protective coating has worn away in some places. This spring, they were dented by a ship’s anchor.
Had they ruptured, both lakes – and the fresh water and the economies of the entire region – could have been essentially destroyed. As much as 540,000 barrels of oil and propane and other fuels are pumped through these lines every day.
U.S. Senator Gary Peters told me a year ago that he had asked the head admiral of the Coast Guard if they could salvage the situation if Line 5 were to rupture, and he said no.
These lines are owned by Enbridge, a Canadian-based multi-national energy firm. Incidentally, the vast majority of the oil pumped through the pipelines is not for us at all, but is being sent from one part of Canada to another part of Canada. Line 5 does carry some propane for the Upper Peninsula, but there are other cost-efficient ways to get it there.
Enbridge does not, by the way, have a good safety record. When another Enbridge pipeline near the Kalamazoo River ruptured in 2010, incompetent Enbridge workers concluded it was only clogged, and tried to force a higher volume of oil through it. The result cost more than a billion dollars to clean up, and things aren’t back to normal yet.
The Great Lakes hold a fifth of all the fresh water in the world, and a break there would be far more serious. Those lines need to be shut down. But Governor Rick Snyder wants to allow Enbridge to encase them in a cement tunnel instead, something that would take seven to ten years to complete, and which environmentalists think is crazy.
What if the pipeline were to break inside the tunnel, out of metal fatigue or some other reason? Worse, Snyder, who will be out of office forever in two months, wants to make the Mackinac Bridge Authority own the pipeline. This, as vice-chair Barbara Brown says, would be a complete perversion of the Authority’s mandate. It was founded to do just one thing – build, operate, maintain and look after the bridge.
Brown knows what she’s talking about; her grandfather, U.S. Senator Prentiss Brown, a moving force behind the bridge itself, was the Authority’s first chair. Thanks to a quirk, Snyder, however, can appoint four of the seven commissioners next month.
Both Snyder and Enbridge have already left disastrous environmental legacies. Still, he may pick puppets who will allow him to ram this through.
This needs to be stopped, and left for the next governor and legislature to decide. I suggest you let him and your lawmakers know how you feel.
