Tribe and environmental groups urge Wisconsin officials to rule against relocating pipeline
MADISON, Wis. — A tribal leader and conservationists urged state officials Thursday to reject plans to relocate part of an aging pipeline in northern Wisconsin, warning that the new route would still pose a threat of a catastrophic oil spill.
About 12 miles (19 kilometers) of the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline runs through the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Reservation. The pipeline carries up to 23 million gallons (about 87 million liters) of oil and natural gas per day from the city of Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario.
The tribe filed a lawsuit against Enbridge in 2019, seeking to force the company to remove the pipeline from the reservation. The tribe alleges that the 71-year-old pipeline is susceptible to a catastrophic spill and that the land rights that allowed Enbridge to operate on the reservation expired in 2013.
Enbridge has proposed a 41-mile (66-kilometer) bypass around the reservation’s southern boundary. The project would require permits from multiple government agencies, including the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Part of the permitting process requires the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program, a division within Gov. Tony Evers’ Department of Administration, to make a determination as to whether the diversion complies with the state’s coastal protection policy.
Bad River Chairman Robert Blanchard told department officials at a public hearing on the matter that the diversion would bypass the reservation and that any spill could impact the reservation’s waters for years to come.
Other opponents, including representatives from the National Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club, warned that building the new route could harm the environment by worsening erosion and runoff. The new route would leave dozens of waterways vulnerable to an oil spill, they added.
They also said Enbridge has a poor safety record, citing a 2010 rupture of Enbridge’s Line 6B in southern Michigan that spilled 800,000 gallons (about 3 million liters) of oil into the Kalamazoo River system.
Supporters argued that the reroute could create hundreds of jobs for the state’s construction workers and engineers. The pipeline provides energy to the entire region, and there are no viable alternatives to the reroute proposal, Emily Pritzkow, executive director of the Wisconsin Building Trades Council, said at the hearing.
Enbridge spokeswoman Juli Kellner told The Associated Press in an email Thursday night that the most likely effect of construction will be more sediment in waterways, which she said will dissipate within days of construction.
Millions of customers in the upper Midwest rely on the pipeline for energy, she said. The line has been operating safely on the Bad River Reservation since 1953, and the chance of a spill is small, Kellner said.
It’s unclear when a ruling will come. Department of Administration spokeswoman Tatyana Warrick said it’s unclear how a noncompatibility finding would affect the project because so many other government agencies are involved in issuing permits.
The company has only about two years left to complete the diversion, U.S. District Judge William Conley said last summer ordered Enbridge to close the portion of the pipeline that crosses the reservation within three years and pay the tribe more than $5 million for violations. An Enbridge appeal is being processed at a federal appeals court in Chicago.
Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a lawsuit in 2019 to shut down the two sections of Line 5 that run beneath the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow waterways that connect Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Nessel argued that anchor surges could rupture the line, potentially causing a devastating oil spill. That lawsuit is still pending in a federal appeals court.
Michigan regulators in December approved the company’s $500 million plan to plug the portion of the pipeline under the strait. a tunnel to mitigate risks. The plan is awaiting approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.