DETROIT – The Ambassador Bridge that connects Detroit to Windsor, Ontario is nearly a century old. In recent years, chunks of concrete have fallen from the bridge into neighborhoods in Windsor.
Canadian officials have repeatedly expressed concerns about the bridge’s structural integrity. Laws protecting the environment were rudimentary at best when the bridge was being built in 1929. But the authorities did insist on one thing: No hazardous materials –including explosives, flammable or poisonous gases, poisons, could be moved across the bridge. That’s been the rule ever since.
Until now.
Late last month, as the Michigan Legislature was about to pass a supplemental appropriations bill to help those affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the Republican leadership in the state senate inserted language at the last minute to allow HazMat to be taken across the Ambassador Bridge.
Canadian officials, environmentalists, and others were horrified. State Senator Stephanie Chang, a Democrat who represents the neighborhoods surrounding the bridge, refused to support the bill.
“My first priority is always to protect the health and safety of my residents,” she said. “Allowing these types of materials to be transported across the Ambassador Bridge — a bridge that is over 90 years old, not up to the same level of inspections, traffic safety features, spill containment or fire suppression systems needed to protect my residents’ safety –is downright dangerous.
“During the pandemic, we need to focus on improving people’s health and safety, not actively work to jeopardize it,” she wrote in a column she sent to a Detroit newspaper.
Few other legislators were willing to vote against a bill providing much-needed aid for COVID victims, however, and the bill easily passed. Tellingly, no single Republican senator came forward to take responsibility for inserting the lines allowing HazMat on the bridge, though Senator Pete Stamas, who chairs the appropriations committee, was said to be the main author.
But there is no real mystery as to why they did it:
The Moroun family, who own the Ambassador, have been trying to get their bridge approved for HazMat for years, and have donated heavily to the campaigns of key GOP lawmakers. They never got anywhere under the last governor, Republican Rick Snyder.
Current Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has opposed the idea too, but Republicans control the legislature. Michigan governors do have line-item veto power. But that apparently applies only to things for which money is appropriated, and there is no direct appropriation in connection with the HazMat prohibition.
Some urged her to find grounds to veto it anyway. On Dec. 29, she did just that, declaring the HazMat language unconstitutional and unenforceable. Whether the legislature accepts that without a fight, however, remains to be seen.
But Canadian officials have made their feelings very clear. Brian Masse, who represents the area surrounding Ontario’s side of the bridge in the Canadian Parliament, immediately fired off a letter to Marc Garneau in Ottawa, the Canadian transport minister.
Masse asked if the Canadian government had been consulted, and asked Ottawa to do something, “prior to any implementation of such a change that is widely opposed on both sides of our border, puts the traveling public and our local communities, economies, and drinking water at risk in the case of a hazardous materials accident.”
The threat to public safety, he added, was “alarming and unacceptable,” and appears also to violate United States laws and standards for hazardous material routing restrictions.
Garneau replied, saying “I assure you I share many of the same concerns,” and said he had directed his staff to prioritize their work to analyze the issue “with the goal of determining the consequences,” and said they were meeting with their counterparts in the Whitmer administration to try to figure out what should be done.
There is, officials on both sides of the border say, no real need to allow HazMat on the Ambassador Bridge, The Detroit-Windsor Truck Ferry exists for just that purpose; as Senator Chang noted, it is “well-maintained and bi-nationally inspected.” The Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron also is safe for Hazmat.
Plus, the new international Gordie Howe bridge, now beginning to rise over the river a mile or so south of the Ambassador will be certified completely safe for HazMat when it opens in 2024.
Gregg Ward, who owns and operates the truck ferry, said “Well, I never thought a COVID relief bill would be designed to put me out of business.” Long a critic of the Morouns, he interprets this as just another way they can maximize their profits, and get trucks carrying HazMat to fill their tanks at the duty-free gas station they own.
“They have 10,000 trucks a day. We have 40 to 80,” he said. Ward, who is locally regarded as an expert on all issues having to do with either bridge, also noted that more than 400 residents of neighborhoods around the Ambassador Bridge have signed petitions opposing moving hazardous materials across the ancient bridge.
Those residents, however, are mostly poor; they don’t contribute much to political campaigns, and few vote Republican.
They would not, however, be the only ones to suffer if there were an accident on a bridge that lacks modern equipment to fight a disaster. On November 11, a truck carrying HazMat hit a jackknifed tractor-trailer on the Brent Spence bridge linking Ohio and Kentucky.
It was completely closed for six weeks. If that happened to the Ambassador Bridge, it could essentially paralyze large sectors of the auto industry in both countries.
You have to wonder who thinks that would be worth the risk.
(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
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