We live in a crazy world. The Precision Pipeline flag blunder story received a fair amount of attention yesterday. After the Detroit Free Press printed the photo, a handful of other news outlets picked it up (for instance, here and here and here) and it made some rounds on Facebook and probably got some tweets as well. There were even a few new details: evidently, it wasn’t a corporate flag, but a Penn State flag, placed there by a couple of employees– themselves veterans, according to a Precision representative.
We confess to some misgivings about all of this. Our original post was meant to be cheeky. Aside from the breach of U.S. flag etiquette, which probably ought not to be dismissed, we just found the image an amusing metaphor for some of the disregard and thoughtlessness Enbridge and some of its contractors have displayed toward landowners, local municipalities, and the citizens of Michigan– things we’ve been documenting with grave seriousness for months. If it were up to us, we’d much prefer to see this story or this one or this one (to name a few) receiving lots of attention.
Still, it bothers us if it is true that the persons responsible for raising the Penn State flag may face disciplinary action, as the Free Press headline states. That would be an unfortunate unintended consequence of this and we would regret having a hand in it; surely those men meant no real harm– even though it was clearly not a good idea to hang that flag the way they did.
Furthermore, it is probably also true that this little dust-up will look to Enbridge like another example of how they just can’t get a fair shake, how their every little move (or even moves they don’t themselves make) becomes fodder for critics looking to bash them at every turn. We can understand that. It’s surely one reason why so many Enbridge representatives– Denise Hamsher at the Pipeline Safety Trust conference last week is a case in point– often seem so defensive.
Yet Enbridge also has to take responsibility for creating the atmosphere of mistrust and antagonism that causes people to view their every move (and the moves of their associates) with such suspicion. That’s the consequence of their mishandling (to put it charitably) of Marshall, of their attempt to steamroll their way through this replacement project, of their flouting of local ordinances and their dismissal of local authority, of their unfair treatment of landowners, of their violations of line list agreements, and of the dozens of evasive, misleading, and counterfactual statements in public and in private from their spokespersons and ROW agents. Those are the things that, ultimately, generated this little flag flap. As Beth Duman herself has said before, if it weren’t for all of that bad behavior, we wouldn’t be paying attention to Enbridge or (Precision Pipeline) at all.