The nine-year anniversary today of the bursting of Enbridge Energy’s Line 6B near Marshall that sent 1.2 million gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River is being used by activists to remind state officials of the risk to the Great Lakes with the Canadian firm’s Line 5 pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac. Cayley Winters is with Progress Michigan.
“If Line 5 bursts, it’s going to be a complete catastrophe on an environmental aspect,” Winters tells the Michigan News Network. “Lawmakers really need to start pushing for more renewable energy and other ways to get propane to people in the Upper Peninsula so they can heat their homes in the winter.”
Line 5 is a major supplier of the U.P.’s propane supply, and also sends crude oil to refineries in Detroit and Sarnia, Ontario.
Activists held a rally in Kalamazoo today and they protested outside the offices of Enbridge in Lansing to call for Line 5’s decommissioning. The company had a deal with former Governor Rick Snyder to build a tunnel in the bedrock under the Straits and move the aging pipelines underground instead on the lake bed, which followed damage from an anchor strike last summer, No oil or natural gas leaked in the incident.
Governor Whitmer’s administration tossed that agreement. She has been negotiating with Enbridge for a new solution, while Attorney General Dana Nessel at the same time has been trying to get the pipelines permanently shut down. The Kalamazoo River oil spill was dwarfed in national news coverage in the summer of 2010 by BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
