Oil and water don’t mix — especially when the latter involves the Great Lakes, the repository of more than 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. And yet for nearly 70 years, an oil company has pumped crude oil through the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron connect and where Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas come closest.
The two aging,
4.5-mile sections of underwater pipeline are a ticking time bomb. I’m taking every action I can to shut them down, to protect two Great Lakes and the jobs that depend on them.
Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. owns the pipeline, known as Line 5, which is part of a network that transports crude oil and other petroleum products from Western Canada. In 1953, a forerunner Enbridge company secured an easement from the state of Michigan for $2,450 to run the pipeline through the Straits. It now moves about 540,000 barrels of crude and natural gas liquids through the Great Lakes daily.
For decades, few people even realized that the dual pipelines passed through the Straits. But catastrophic oil spills have since alerted millions of Americans to the enormous potential dangers. In Michigan, the turning point might have been in 2010. In April of that year, the deadly disaster of the BP
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig poured millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico; three months later, an Enbridge pipeline in Michigan, Line 6B, ruptured, sending hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil gushing into a creek feeding the
Kalamazoo River, near Marshall, Mich. It was one of the
largest inland oil spills in U.S. history.
After those twin catastrophes, eyes turned to the aging oil pipelines running through the Great Lakes.
While Enbridge says its pipelines pose no threat, the record from just the past few years says otherwise. The Straits of Mackinac is a busy shipping channel, with the dual pipelines lying perpendicular to passing ships. In April 2018, a commercial vessel inadvertently dropped and dragged a massive anchor across the pipelines while passing through the Straits. An “underwater pipeline inspection video shows deep scoring along the lake bottom, then up and over the twin pipelines,” the Detroit Free Press later reported. “Deep marks are etched in both pipelines, and there is evidence of outer protective coating loss.”
It was just a matter of luck that the pipelines did not rupture. Then, in 2020, Enbridge
disclosed another strike on Line 5, one that caused significant damage to a pipeline support, likely by either an anchor or cables from a passing ship. Another catastrophe dodged.
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