To understand the concern many people have over Line 5, time-travel back to the fall of 1953. America was obsessed with Senator Joe McCarthy’s crusade against Communists, not environmental regulations. Sometime in October or November, a Canadian firm that would become Enbridge finished putting the twin pipelines on the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac.
They’ve been there ever since, carrying 540,000 gallons of oil and other petroleum products every day. Last spring, a tugboat anchor damaged, but did not penetrate one of the ancient lines. Earlier in the year, U.S. Senator Gary Peters told me that he had asked the head admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard if they could rescue and clean up Lakes Michigan and Huron if the pipelines were to rupture and a major oil spill occurred.
The answer was no, that the most important source of fresh water in our hemisphere likely would be damaged beyond repair. The more you learn about the pipeline, the grimmer the situation seems. The more you learn about the pipeline, the more it seems crazy to allow this thing to keep operating for even one more day. By the way, it provides very little for this country.
Essentially, it takes oil from one part of Canada to another part of Canada, some of it for export aboard. Yes, it does supply a little less than half the propane the Upper Peninsula needs, but experts say that need could be met by a couple railroad cars a day, or four or five tanker trucks. Yes, the price would be a little higher, possibly a nickel a gallon.
But you can’t possibly put a price tag on the value of keeping the Great Lakes free from an oil spill. Here’s all you have to know about Enbridge: Eight years ago, that firm’s pipeline near the Kalamazoo River ruptured. When the alarms went off, incompetent Enbridge workers somehow concluded that the line was just clogged, and so they kept forcing oil through.
The cleanup cost more than a billion dollars and is still not complete. Now, if you know about state government in Michigan, you know that it takes forever to get anything done. I’m not a conspiracy theory kind of guy. But isn’t a little suspicious that they were able to create a new body, this Mackinac Straits Corridor Authority, in a manner of days?
Isn’t it curious how so many automatically swallowed Enbridge’s claims not only that it can put the pipeline in a tunnel, but how long that would take, how much it will cost and how safe all this would be? And why are so many, including Governor Snyder, so concerned about making sure Enbridge gets exactly what it wants?
Did you realize, by the way, that the tunnel idea means they want to keep pumping oil through these ancient pipes for decades more? When asked what would happen were the pipelines to rupture inside the tunnel, Enbridge’s answer is that it won’t.
It’s pretty clear that somebody in high places sees money in this for themselves. The bottom line goes something like this. If Enbridge’s theory is right, then they and their shareholders will get a little richer. If they are wrong, the ecology and the fresh water supply of this quadrant of the world could easily be ruined beyond repair.
Let’s hope that Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel have the power and the willpower to do the right thing, and find a way to shut this monstrous threat down.
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