There is a danger buried in the Great Lakes which has the potential to contaminate the largest system of freshwater in the world.
Enbridge, the world's largest crude oil transporter has two aging pipelines buried beneath the Great Lakes in the Straits of Mackinac which connect Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
In a Vice Motherboard documentary released in August, filmmaker Spencer Chumbley travels to the area to interview experts, residents, advocates, and the company responsible for the pipeline. According to Bruce Trudgen, one of the last living workers who helped build the pipelines in 1953, they were only built to last 50 years. They are currently 62 years old.
Enbridge has a particularly disturbing record on oil spills--more than 800 spills in North America between 1999 and 2010 which released over 6.8 million gallons of oil. Enbridge is also responsible for the largest inland oil spill in American history--the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill which released nearly one million gallons of oil into the surrounding environment.
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Environmental advocates and residents are frustrated with Enbridge--many feel the company is withholding valuable information from the public and there is a real lack of transparency regarding the company and it's work.
Given the lack of transparency and lack of information available from Enbridge or the government, environmental advocates with the National Wildlife Federation decided to inspect the pipelines themselves. On their dive, they found broken structural braces and sections of the pipeline that were completely unsupported.
While Enbridge claims to take care of their pipes, they have since been ordered to position 40 structural braces along the pipeline at increments of 75 feet, to meet the original building easement set in the 1950's.
Dave Schwab, research scientist with the University of Michigan, has some very disturbing research featured in this documentary. In a best case scenario where a pipe is shut down immediately after a rupture, at least 1.5 million gallons of oil would be spilled into the Great Lakes. Worse yet, the location of the pipeline is disastrous--it is an area of cross currents which would quickly contaminate both Lake Huron and Lake Michigan in a matter of hours and spread to uncontrollable parts of the lakes in a few days.
Best case dispersal Scenario for an oil spill in the Great Lakes
Enbridge representative Jason Manshum says the pipes are regularly maintained and that adding braces were planned. He claims the idea that an oil company wouldn't maintain their pipes is "atrocious." With 800 oil spills on a company's record, one could be reasonably suspicious of his defense of Enbridge.
Worse still, is that the Federal government has no across-the-board standard for when maintenance must be done, leaving decisions about maintenance, risk assessment, and pipe conditions up to the individual companies. This lack of oversight and standardization puts the American public and environment at risk of exposure and destruction by the extensive oil pipeline network running in the Great Lakes and across the country.
With this lackadaisical oversight, it would seem that a company could view oil spills and the costs associated with them as a cost of doing business. State and Federal governments should do more to increase transparency about the pipelines, inspect and hold high standards to pipelines, and go so far as to hold companies responsible for spills at the cost of their business for repeat offenders.