Michigan leaders have tunnel vision on Line 5

Jim Olson is founder and president of FLOW (For Love of Water), a Great Lakes water law and policy nonprofit organization.

When we think of “tunnel vision” we think of narrow-mindedness, myopic thinking, or the horses at the start of the Kentucky Derby with blinders, eyes fixed straight ahead on only one option ‒ a one-way, no-return, single track. Applied to the words and actions of our state’s leaders over the last several years to remove the catastrophic risk to the Straits and the Great Lakes from Enbridge Line 5, the phrase could not be more accurate. While putting up the façade of leadership on Line 5, our leaders have in complicity narrowed the alternatives for Line 5 to a new replacement line or tunnel in the Straits.

It started with the rupture in 2010 of Enbridge’s Line 6b that crosses southern Michigan from Indiana to Sarnia, Canada, spilling a million gallons into the Kalamazoo River and costing more than $1 billion in cleanup so far and untold harm to the river, residents, and quality of life. Nearly everyone in Michigan saw the video clips of the black tar balls and ooze, dead fish and waterfowl, the largest oil spill into inland waters in our country’s history. The disaster triggered a number of questions, not the least of which was to look for other aging crude oil pipelines that cross the waters of Michigan. The answer came as a shock – 64-year-old Line 5, a 645-mile long line from Wisconsin across the UP, and, there it was, right there on the Public Service Commission’s (“PSC”) map, in the Straits of Mackinac, then down through Northern Michigan’s to near Port Huron, under the St. Clair River and into Canada. 

‘If you seek a pleasant peninsula...’ 

Governor Snyder responded that there was nothing Michigan could do about Line 5, because the federal government had exclusive jurisdiction and control over Line 5.

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