Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership
Last month, Canadian oil pipeline company Enbridge reported a by now-familiar event to the Wisconsin DNR – its Line 6 pipeline had spilled 70,000 gallons of oil in southern Wisconsin. Apparently caused by a faulty pipe connection, the spill contaminated much surrounding soil, though the full extent of the damage is not yet clear.
This spill is the company’s largest yet in Wisconsin, though not its first. Fortunately, it’s also much smaller than Enbridge’s record-large 1991 1.7 million gallon oil spill near Grand Rapids, Minnesota – the largest inland oil spill in United States history. That spill took place along the old Line 3 pipeline, much of which has been replaced and partly rerouted.
The new spill in Wisconsin hits home for me in multiple ways. For one thing, it happened within a half-hour drive from where I grew up. For another, this spill is exactly the kind of incident that MEP, allied organizations, and tribal advocates have been warning can and will happen on the Enbridge network. That includes the recently-built Line 3, which runs beneath some of Minnesota’s most vulnerable wetlands and wild rice waters, and Line 5, which currently traverses tribal territory and threatens Lake Superior.
The spill in southern Wisconsin has, hopefully, had little environmental impact on the surrounding area, despite apparent flaws in the company’s spill detection system. Time will tell. Likewise, the Line 3 spill in 1991 could have been much worse if it had not been mitigated by icy conditions on the surrounding rivers.
What could happen if an Enbridge pipeline ruptures under unlucky conditions? What if Line 3 spills its Canadian tar sands oil – which is notoriously hard to clean up in aquatic environments – into a wild rice lake? What if Line 5 spills into the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, or into the territory of the Bad River Band of Chippewa? Any such spill would be a pollution event of historic scale and a tremendous blow against the tribes that rely on those waters for food and cultural heritage. It could create a permanent ecological scar.
Throughout the permitting process for the new Line 3, MEP and members warned agencies about that kind of spill and other environmental and climate impacts of the pipeline. The pipeline was built anyway, and its construction has already permanently damaged aquatic ecosystems. The oil it carries is a climate disaster, especially the carbon-dense oil from the tar sands.
All of this is not to say “I-told-you-so.” Rather, it’s to emphasize “it’s not too late to start fixing it.”
Wisconsin, which has given approval for Enbridge to reroute Line 5, should think again. This pipeline network is not a good neighbor for Minnesotans, Wisconsinites, Michiganders, or anyone else situated near its oil infrastructure. It should not be treated as a partner to be appeased, but as a threat to our environmental health.
To shut these pipelines down, however, we’ll need to make big strides on decarbonizing our transportation sector. We’ll need improved transit, pedestrian infrastructure, e-bikes, and electric vehicles. We’ll need to clean up the way we power air travel and shipping.
All of this is not merely desirable, but doable, mostly using technology that already exists. We can make oil pipelines, or most of them, obsolete. We can choose to make oil spills – depressingly regular events here in the Midwest – a thing of the past.