Enbridge Caught Not Telling the Truth about Line 5: Ho-Hum

Enbridge Caught Not Telling the Truth about Line 5: Ho-Hum

In not-even-remotely shocking news, the Detroit Free Press reported this past week that Enbridge knew about damaged protective coating on Line 5 for years before divulging that information to Michigan state officials. In response, some of those state officials are pretending like this is an unexpected breach of trust. Here, for example, is Valerie Brader, co-chair of the state’s Pipeline Advisory Board:

“We are deeply disappointed that Enbridge did not tell the Pipeline Safety Advisory Board in March the whole story about Line 5 coating deficiencies. . . “Enbridge owes the people of Michigan, the Advisory Board and the State an apology. This issue is too important to the people of Michigan to not tell the truth in a timely manner, and right now any trust we had in Enbridge has been seriously eroded.”

And here is the tough-talking-do-nothing Attorney General Bill Schuette:

“This latest revelation by Enbridge means that the faith and trust Michigan has placed in Enbridge has reached an even lower level. . . Enbridge needs to do more than apologize, Enbridge owes the citizens of Michigan a full and complete explanation of why they failed to truthfully report the status of the pipeline.”

How Brader or anyone else could have had any trust at all in Enbridge at this point is hard to fathom (as I explain below). And exactly what it is Schuette is asking for is anybody’s guess (what good is providing a detailed account of why they lied going to do?).

In fairness, not everybody was quite so shocked. The National Wildlife Federation’s Mike Shirberg, for example, knows the score:

“The fact that Enbridge has known about these breaks in coating for years is, unfortunately, less surprising than it ought to be,” Shriberg said in a statement. “It seems every month there is a new revelation about the deteriorating condition of Line 5 and Enbridge’s lack of transparency.”

Shirberg is right of course, but even his memory doesn’t reach back quite far enough. The really troubling thing about this latest example of Enbridge’s untrustworthiness is just how uncannily it reprises the circumstances that led to the infamous Line 6B rupture in Marshall in 2010—and that should worry everybody. On this blog, I’ve rehearsed the findings of the NTSB report on that spill more times than I can count. Every Michigander should know this history backwards and forwards. But for now, it’s worth recalling two of those findings in particular:

First, the NTSB report revealed that Enbridge knew about problems with Line 6B for years, but repeatedly determined that the defects their tests revealed did not pose any real threat. Thus the NTSB criticized them for: “Deficient integrity management procedures, which allowed well-documented crack defects in corroded areas to propagate until the pipeline failed.”

Secondly, Enbridge failed to communicate effectively with the public and first responders, which ultimately made the spill much, much worse than it otherwise might have been. That is, the NTSB criticized Enbridge for “Insufficient public awareness and education, which allowed the release to continue for nearly 14 hours after the first notification of an odor to local emergency response agencies.”

The NTSB attributed both of these failures to what it called Enbridge’s “culture of deviance” from its own safety processes and procedures.

So what does Enbridge have to say in response to this latest discovery on Line 5? Here’s their spokesman Patrick Duffy:

“The coating damage was determined not to present any threat to the safety of the pipeline at any time,” he said.

And:

“We regret that this miscommunication may have caused confusion for state officials and the public. We are committed to being transparent on all matters related to the safe operations of our pipelines in Michigan.”

You read that right. Just like with Line 6B, Enbridge didn’t bother telling anybody about the defects they discovered on Line 5 because they determined internally that those defects aren’t a problem. And just like with Line 6B they failed to communicate honestly and openly with the public and local officials. So here we are again. This is not a disappointment or a breach of trust. This is a pattern of behavior that runs very deep.

What makes all of this even worse is that Enbridge has for the past 5 years taken every opportunity to tell us all how very much they have learned from the Marshall spill (even though history shows they don’t learn from their mistakes), how it’s something they’ll never forget (even though they can’t even tell the truth about when it happened) and how much it has transformed the company (despite so much evidence to the contrary— and more and more— including this latest). But despite all the lip service and weird fetishistic iconography they’ve created to convince us that they’ve changed, their actions suggest otherwise.

And this leaves Patrick Duffy uttering nonsense the likes of which is probably making even our old friend Larry Springer blush. Duffy maintains that the company didn’t know about the missing coating in March. But he also concedes that the company’s engineers did know. Asked why officials told the Pipeline Safety Advisory Board there were no areas of exposed metal on Line 5, Duffy says such “statements were accurate to the best of their awareness”– whatever that means. He then chalks the whole thing up to “an internal reporting issue” before gaslighting the whole state, implying that concerns about exposed steel are just overreaction: “Enbridge has come to recognize that issues which do not present a threat to the safety of the pipeline can still present a strong concern to Michigan,” he says, promising that “we are adjusting our communication approach accordingly.” (Whatever that last statement means, I’m quite sure it’s not “we will tell the truth next time.”) You don’t have to be a professional psychologist to recognize this as the sort of incoherent gibberish a person generates when they’re completely full of shit.

It’s not clear what the state will do in the face of this completely predictable revelation. Unfortunately, my best guess is that the state won’t do much at all. But whatever the case, it’s long past time we should accept anyone– elected officials, members of the Pipeline Safety Advisory Board, reporters, or anyone else paying the slightest attention– pretending to find Enbridge’s mistakes, missteps, misinformation, or misleading information to be anything other than business as usual.

 

 

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

On the heels of recent news that Enbridge has long been in violation of safety requirements for its operation of Line 5 under the Straits of Mackinac, our tireless friends over at the National Wildlife Federation have released the latest video in thei recent series of short documentaries about the Kalamazoo spill and its aftermath. They are teriffic. And they reveal how Enbridge’s cavalier (or brazen, if you prefer) attitude toward regulatory compliance is built into the fabric of their corporate culture. You can watch all three of the short films and read more over at the Wildlife Promise blog. But since the third of these just happens to feature this very blog– along with Larry Bell of the great Bell’s Brewery, who gives his version of a story I told in real time back in 2013— I’ve included it here.

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

We’re back! We’ve got a spiffy new look, a new mission (details below), and starting right now in this very sentence I’m even dropping, for good, the rhetorical first person plural. Yep, things have changed during the eighteen or so months this blog has been dormant.

Among those changes, in case you haven’t heard, is that Line 6B is evidently no longer Line 6B. With no real explanation, Enbridge recently decided to start calling it Line 78. It’s not altogether clear why, though I suspect they saw this in part as an opportunity for some re-branding—you know, on account of the spotty reputation of Line 6B— maybe even a continuation of their project to obscure the history they love to say, sometimes with creepy tokens, they’ll never forget. But just because they’ve chosen a new name doesn’t mean we have to use it— no more than we have to comply with their misleading, ahistorical insistence that “oil sands” is the “accurate” term for the filthy stuff dug up from the ground in Alberta and flowing through the pipeline in my backyard as I type this. So you can rest assured that I plan on keeping the name “Line 6B Citizens’ Blog.”

But that doesn’t mean nothing around here is changing. After all, for most Line 6B landowners, the long, torturous construction saga known as the Line 6B “replacement” project ended almost two years ago— and with it ended some of the urgent necessity of this blog. It’s been a while since Enbridge finally packed up its monstrous tree-eating machines, its backhoes, its welding rigs, and its pack of scurrilous, lying land agents and headed north so it could commence destroying properties, suing municipalities, and buying off politicians in Minnesota and Wisconsin. All of which they are doing, of course, aided and abetted by the Department of Justice, which turned what should have been a sharp rebuke and deterrent to Enbridge’s standard operating procedures into a rather large gift. So as long as Enbridge continues to get its way, why change its behavior?

Not all the news of the past eighteen months has been bad, though. The movement to shut down Line 5, those two rickety old pipes traversing the Straits of Mackinac, has grown beyond what anyone ever could have expected. More and more citizens, members of the business community, clergy, and even some (unlikely) politicians have begun to take seriously the dangers that aging line poses to the world’s largest source of fresh water. Another positive development is the courageous action taken by the Bad River Band of of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa in Wisconsin. In order to protect the sensitive natural resources that sustain the tribe’s fishing and hunting lifeways, the Bad River tribal council voted not to renew Enbridge’s lease to operate Line 5 on tribal land. And there has been good news from Minnesota as well, where, thanks to a lawsuit filed by our friends at the Friends of the Headwaters, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that Enbridge must complete a full Environmental Impact Statement for its proposed pipeline expansions (one of which appears to be dead).

Developments like these hardly seemed possible when I started this blog in 2012. Grass roots movements against pipelines in the U.S., with one major exception, didn’t occupy anywhere near the space in public consciousness they inhabit today (which isn’t to say that nothing was brewing five years ago). Save for some talented reporters at a scrappy upstart online newspaper, Line 6B certainly wasn’t on many people’s radar, as my wife and I learned to our deep dismay when we tried to contact Michigan elected officials about the “replacement project.” Nor had many people heard of Line 5, Pegasus, the Alberta Clipper, Line 3, Dakota Access, Nexus, ET Rover, Northeast Energy Direct. LNG, or Trans Mountain— not to mention PHMSA and FERC.

The movements to resist each of these projects originated in local, even hyperlocal, concerns— call it NIMBYism if you want. But another change is that these movements are no longer so confined. They now form distinct nodes in a transnational network of efforts to exert local autonomy and authority against the onslaught of an energy infrastructure development beast running completely amok, virtually unconstrained by the state and federal agencies charged with protecting the public interest. Even more broadly, these movements have come to represent some of the most important and most visible sites of citizen action in response to the urgencies of climate change and the energy future.

A good deal of credit for this shift in public awareness about the relationship between local concerns like property rights and global concerns like climate change, forged by bringing fossil fuel transport aboveground (so to speak), is due to Bold Nebraska and the alliances they formed—between cowboys and Indians, ranchers and climate activists—to fight against Keystone XL. More recently, similar movements led by indigenous peoples like the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors in North Dakota have helped bring to light some further historical and ethical dimensions of this nexus, like the legacy of settler colonialism and important questions about climate justice, since indigenous and other poor populations will suffer most from the effects of climate change.

Admittedly, all of these matters weren’t foremost in my mind when I started this blog. The pain of witnessing the destruction of my property and a desire to see my neighbors and other property owners treated fairly motivated my efforts. The generosity and vast knowledge provided by the Pipeline Safety Trust aided those efforts immeasurably while also expanding my understanding of pipeline politics beyond my homefront. From there, my academic training led me to seek out not just resources for dealing with pipeline issues but also contexts and intellectual frameworks within which to understand and think through the broader social, political, and historical dimensions of what was happening in my backyard and the backyards of my neighbors. Those contexts and frameworks, inspired by the writings, conversations, friendships, and exchanges I’ve had with with scholars, activists, advocates, artists, ordinary citizens, and even members of the fossil fuel industry—will form the basis of the reinvented (and reinvigorated) Line 6B Citizens’ Blog.

In the academic world, scholars of literature (like me), history, anthropology, philosophy, political science and other fields who are bringing their disciplinary training to bear upon the cultural implications of our long love affair with (or addiction to?) hydrocarbons, climate change, ecology, environmental justice, energy policy, the nonhuman world, and more have created a broad, loosely defined field of study known as the Environmental Humanities. The kind of inquiry that animates the Environmental Humanities, almost by definition, takes up ethical questions, matters of public policy, and subjects of pressing real-world concern. For that reason, many EH scholars are eager for opportunities to engage with audiences and publics outside of the (sometimes too narrow) academic sphere—something I learned when I collaborated with my Oakland University colleagues to organize a climate change symposium at our campus. It’s my hope that the new Line 6B Citizens’ Blog can provide an ongoing forum for this kind of public engagement and, even better, for building a community comprised of groups of people that don’t always get the chance to communicate with one another.

All of this means I’ll mostly feature other voices on this blog from now on. I’ve asked some of the smartest and most interesting thinkers I know— many, but not all, of them Environmental Humanities scholars— to help keep this blog alive.  And I hope to recruit others as well. Of course, I promise I won’t stop reporting on Enbridge. Nor will I cease to do whatever I can to help protect landowners and the environment from their latest shenanigans. But I’m also eager to let others have this platform for a while to explore issues that extend beyond (but also extend very much from) what has happened with Enbridge here in Michigan. I hope, loyal readers, that you’ll stick around. We all have much to learn from one another.

We’re going to kick things off with a brand new series centered upon a theme near and dear to all of us along Line 6B: “Backyards.” That series will launch very soon—and I am very excited about it. Please stay tuned.

Oakland University Climate Symposium

Oakland University Climate Symposium

Many long time readers of this blog are aware that we keep a side gig teaching American literature at Oakland University. Over the past several months, we’ve been collaborating with a couple of our magnificent colleagues to organize an exciting event to which we’d like to invite you: a one day symposium on climate change we’re calling “Climate Literacies: Reading the Anthropocene.”

The symposium will bring together scholars from the humanities and sciences, conservationists, leaders of Michigan environmental organizations, activists, and advocates for environmental justice to talk about politics, scholarship, the arts, the ecology of the Great Lakes, and the implications of climate change for Michigan and beyond. And don’t worry, Enbridge is sure to get a mention!ClimatePoster_B_Final

The event will take place October 15, starting, from 9 am-7 pm in the Oakland Room of the Oakland Center on the campus of Oakland University.

The symposium will begin with an address by the University of Michigan’s Henry Pollack, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and author of A World Without Ice. It will conclude with a keynote address titled “Love and Death in the Anthropocene” by the brilliant and innovative literary scholar Dana Luciano of Georgetown University.

In between, we’ll have lots of conversation and fascinating presentations featuring, among others, some friends we’ve made here at the blog as well as others whose work we’ve long admired. In addition to OU faculty, including our co-organizers, Professors Andrea Knutson and Hunter Vaughan, symposium participants are:

The event is free and open to the public. Please join us– and bring your friends!

About that Pipeline Secrecy Bill…

About that Pipeline Secrecy Bill…

We hope everyone is enjoying the summer. We certainly are, which is why we’ve been (more than) a little neglectful of the blog of late. We hope you’ll forgive us!

Readers of this blog are probably aware of a certain anniversary that’s coming up in a couple of weeks. We’ll be remembering also. If you’re in the area, you should try to make the event.

And while you’re pondering that dark part of Michigan’s history, you might take a moment to think about how we can prevent such a thing from happening ever again. That’s a heavy task, but we can tell you one thing that won’t help: less transparency from pipeline companies.

We’re reminded of this because of a baffling recent post from our friends up at the Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Associations (CAEPLA). Thanks to the dedication and hard work of their founder Dave Core, they’ve been helping landowners along pipelines and protecting property rights in Canada for a long time and have done tons of good. We appreciate their efforts tremendously and respect the model they have developed, which is quite interesting.

But earlier this month, they waded into matters down here in Michigan and quickly got themselves in way over their heads. The result is a whole lot of misinformation, shoddy argumentation, and factual inaccuracies. We’re disappointed and sorry to see it. But since they’re taking issue with us specifically– well, they try to take issue with us, but they clearly don’t understand the issue or our position– we think it’s only appropriate to respond.

Honestly, there’s so much wrong with CAEPLA’s take on the proposed changes to Michigan’s FOIA laws— what we’ve been calling the Enbridge Secrecy Bill– that we hardly know where to begin. CAEPLA’s argument is convoluted and, frankly, a little bizarre. And if we didn’t know better, we’d think it was cooked up by pipeline companies themselves. In a nutshell, CAEPLA’s position is this: demanding disclosure of pipeline companies’ proprietary information is ultimately a threat to the protection of individual landowner’s personal or private information.

Now, this is both completely nonsensical and completely irrelevant to the debate at hand (over HB 4540). We explain why below. But first we want to say that virtually every sentence of the post contains something objectionable– if not just plain wrong. For that reason, we’re tempted to dissect it sentence by sentence. But that would probably make for tedious reading and this is going to be long enough as it is. So we’ll just point out three big problems:

1. CAEPLA is needlessly snarky

We’re not sure why, but CAEPLA adopts an unnecessarily snide tone, complete with industry-like caricatures and straw-man arguments. Here’s how they begin:

House Bill 4540 is being depicted as a threat to the public because it would make it more difficult for those who “are concerned about” (read: oppose) pipelines to access companies’ “secret” information.

Now, since CAEPLA takes as its example of the bill’s critics this post of ours, one might reasonably think that the quoted phrase “are concerned about” is something we wrote. But it’s not. We don’t know who are what they’re quoting. The quote seems made up so that CAEPLA can engage in that little bit of parenthetical snark, taking a shot at people who oppose pipelines. What that has to do with Michigan’s HB 4540 we have no idea. Nor do we know what pipeline CAEPLA might be referring to; evidently they just want to conjure up some phantom image of a person who opposes all pipelines. Frankly, we’re surprised by this. It’s the same tired line we’ve heard from the industry time and again. It’s disingenuous and lazy. We’ve responded to it on numerous occasions. The fact is that sometimes, for good reasons, we oppose pipelines; sometimes we don’t.

Here’s a second example of how CAEPLA paints a distorted picture of opponents of HB 4540:

Opponents of the exemption for pipeline companies argue that FOI laws are the only way to protect stakeholders – including landowners – from the growing risks associated with aging pipelines, and from the allegedly more dangerous contents coursing through them.

Again, this is nonsense. We don’t know anybody who has ever said FOIA “laws are the only way to protect stakeholders” from pipeline risks. That would be a foolish thing to argue– which is why nobody is arguing it. Opponents of HB 4540, including ourselves, have advocated many ways to protect against the risk of more pipeline incidents. Transparency is just one piece of a very complicated puzzle.

2. CAEPLA thinks apples are oranges

As we said above, the heart of CAEPLA’s argument is that HB 4540 is essentially a privacy issue. For instance, they say:

The word secret is really just another more ominous way of saying private. As in private property.  The private property of pipeline company shareholders, which of course includes proprietary information.

The word secret is not another way of saying private; it’s a way of saying undisclosed. We have no idea why CAEPLA would try to smuggle the word “private” into this discussion. Presumably, it’s meant to push all sorts of buttons, since we all know that privacy is sacrosanct. You don’t want your privacy invaded, do you? That’s actually the line that CAEPLA takes. We’re not kidding. They say so very explicitly:

Threat to Pipeline Privacy is a Threat to Your Privacy

Now that’s just plain weird. In fact, there is no way whatsoever in which this statement is true. It violates about four different logical fallacies, maybe more. Aside from its implied slippery slope (ask the pipelines to reveal their emergency response program and pretty soon you’ll be forced to reveal what goes on in your bedroom!), it conflates things that are actually quite distinct. First, it conflates the ostensible “privacy” of pipeline companies with your personal privacy. But that’s just plain false. Corporations do not have rights to personal privacy like you do. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court just recently made that very clear. Secondly, CAEPLA conflates property rights with privacy rights. But those things, too, are very different. We don’t want to bore you, but we hope you’ll trust us when we tell you that, historically, the whole idea of a right to privacy depended upon distinguishing it from the right to property (in fact, that little bit of history is sort of a thing for us). Thirdly, it conflates pipeline companies’ proprietary information with the public records they are required to submit to state and federal governments. Those things, too, are distinct. It’s the latter that are covered by FOIA laws. The former is irrelevant.

So to sum up: property is not privacy. A corporation’s proprietary information has nothing whatsoever to do with your right to privacy. Nothing. In the same way, Michigan’s FOIA laws (especially as rewritten by HB 4540) have nothing whatsoever to do with your “personal and business documents.” There is simply no way to get from the one to the other. They’re apples and oranges. CAEPLA’s attempt to force the one on the other is at best confused and at worst a cheap ploy designed to scare you. One might even call it–to borrow a term CAEPLA applies to us– “alarmist.” In fact, if you want an example of alarmism, you really couldn’t do better than this:

But the power of government to pry open a privately owned pipeline company’s proprietary information is the same power to pry open any business’s private affairs and property, including yours.

That sounds bad, frightening even. The problem is that the government here is not prying open any company’s proprietary information. Nor is it prying open any individual’s “private affairs and property.” CAEPLA is just making this up.**

3. Which brings us to our final point: CAEPLA doesn’t understand anything at all about HB 4540 or, it appears, FOIA laws generally.

What we’re talking about here– what Michigan’s HB 4540 is about, what FOIA laws are always about– is access to public records, not to proprietary information. Opponents of HB 4540 aren’t seeking to “pry open” anything. They’re seeking to prevent pipeline companies from concealing even more information (that is, public information, such as documents submitted to government agencies) than they already do. This is CAEPLA’s biggest mistake. They appear not to understand the first thing about what HB 4540 says or why people like us think it is a very bad bill. Instead, they mischaracterize the whole debate over the bill as some attempt on the part of “opponents” to gain access to so-called “private” things they don’t already have access to, to try and “snoop” on the pipeline companies. That’s just plain silly. The debate over HB 4540 has nothing to do with “expropriat[ing] a private enterprise’s informational property.” CAEPLA is making that up, too.

Let us be extra clear on this point: nobody– NOBODY– is suggesting that pipeline companies don’t have the right (the property right) to keep certain kinds of information from the public, whether for proprietary or for security reasons. In fact, as we make very clear in the post that CAEPLA links to (which they apparently either didn’t read or didn’t comprehend), both federal and state laws already provide exemptions for that sort of information. We don’t have a problem with that.

The reason that HB 4540 is objectionable is because it goes far beyond those existing rules and laws. It would potentially allow pipeline companies to reveal even less than they reveal now. In fact, the bill’s language is so vague that it could allow pipeline companies to exempt almost anything from disclosure. And we’re not talking here about trade secrets or the emails that Enbridge executives send to their spouses, we’re talking (it bears repeating) about public records, things like emergency response procedures, the results of internal corrosion inspections, and integrity management systems– the kinds of things that would allow the public to participate in safety accountability.

To once again put this more simply: CAEPLA would have you believe that opponents of HB 4540 have embarked upon some kind of invasive endeavor to gain access to (so-called “private’) information they can’t currently access. We’re not sure if CAEPLA seriously believes that or if they are deliberately distorting the situation. Nor are we sure what CAEPLA has to gain by distorting the debate. But whatever the case, the truth is that what we really oppose is a bill that would prevent the public from gaining access to public information.

Honestly, we have no idea why CAEPLA has suddenly decided to carry water for the industry (and Enbridge in particular). Nor do we know why they suddenly decided to weigh in on matters about which they clearly don’t have even the most basic understanding. We hope they continue their good work, advocating on behalf of landowners. We applaud those efforts; we always have. But we also suggest that they might want to do a little more homework or take a little more care before weighing in on matters beyond their immediate purview.

** Even if CAEPLA’s fictional scenario were real (which it is not), here is a clear example of just how far-fetched and ill-informed it is. These are two of the existing exemptions from disclosure in Michigan’s FOIA law specifically designed to protect privacy:

“(a) Information of a personal nature if public disclosure of the information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy.”

“(b) (iii) [Law enforcement records that would] Constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Stop the Enbridge-Rover Secrecy Law

Stop the Enbridge-Rover Secrecy Law

Imagine a law that says that Enbridge or ET Rover is not required to disclose to you basic facts or details about the pipeline that runs through your backyard.

Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? And yet, that is exactly the law that the Michigan legislature is trying to pass. According to House Bill 4540, basic information “about the production, generation, transportation, transmission, or distribution of fuel or energy” would be exempt from Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act. That means, potentially, that the pipeline company that has access to your property — a company like Enbridge or Vector or Rover– would not have to tell you what materials are getting pumped through the pipeline on your property, where that product is going, or what plans the company has in the event that the pipeline ruptures on your property.

In fact, the language of the bill is so laughably broad that it would exempt pipeline companies from even having to disclose the specific locations of their pipelines– despite the fact that those same pipeline companies are required by federal law to mark the locations of their pipeline right of ways. The pipeline company would also not have to disclose information about its emergency response plans– something of vital importance to all of us. Think about this for a second: according to the proposed law, you would not have the right to know the same details about the operation of the pipeline in your yard that the government knows.

We’re not making this up.

As we noted on Thursday, Keith Matheny has a story on the proposed bill in the Detroit Free Press from earlier in the week. Also this week, the great Jack Lessenberry weighed in on the issue, reminding us why our legislators “don’t deserve our trust”:

They demonstrate daily that they don’t work for us, or care about what we think. Here’s the latest example: Kurt Heise, a Republican state representative from Plymouth, introduced a bill this week to prevent all of us from getting information about things like oil and gas pipelines in this state.

Currently, a lot of people are worried about a pipeline Enbridge has under the straits of Mackinac. If it broke, that would utterly devastate the Great Lakes.

Enbridge, as we know too well, had a pipeline break five years ago, sending more than a million gallons of heavy crude oil into the Kalamazoo River. Its pipeline under Mackinac would be old enough to collect Social Security, if it were a person. If that were to break it could be the worst environmental disaster in our history.

But Kurt Heise doesn’t want us to be able to find out much about it. We wouldn’t be able to find out much about high-energy power lines either, or other critical and potentially dangerous energy sources. He would exempt their owners from the state Freedom of Information Act.

To cover their backsides, the sponsors of the bill, including Kurt Heise, want to pretend that this is a national security issue. Here’s what Heise told the Free Press:

“We do not want people who may have ill intent to be able to locate the exact location of underground utilities, the pumps and surface machinery that may exist with those underground utilities, so they are protected from harm,” Heise said.

But national security risks are nothing new. Nor are pipelines in this state, which have been operating in this state for decades. So why this concern now, all of a sudden? The timing is peculiar to say the least. One plausible explanation for this timing– far more plausible than Heise’s “national security” canard– is that Enbridge’s Line 5 has been the topic of a great deal of scrutiny and concern by the public recently. It’s clear that Enbridge would rather not disclose certain information about that line and its other operations in the state (we can only speculate as to why). So they somehow managed to convince shills like Heise to type up a law for them– a law that would also apply to their industry peers, like Rover.

Whatever the reason for the bill’s appearance now, what is clear is that it won’t ensure public safety. In fact, it will do just the opposite. We know from the Marshall spill– and dozens of other similar spill all across the country— that the oil and gas industry’s failures to comply with safety regulations (and their own safety protocols) pose a far more immediate threat to property, communities, and the environment than terrorists. For that reason, what we need now is more transparency, more scrutiny– not less. Because of the failures of the industry and state and federal regulators, it is more critical than ever to provide citizens with greater information to protect themselves. Yet this bill contains language so broad and so sweeping that a pipeline company could say that almost anything related to the operation of their pipelines “could be useful to a person planning an attack on critical energy infrastructure.”

Put simply, the bill places all of us at even greater risk. What could our legislators possibly be thinking?

Two final points before we ask you to take action:

The sponsors of this legislation– by which we mean both elected officials and oil and gas companies like Enbridge– would have you believe that this bill simply mirrors federal law. Don’t believe them; it’s not true. The bill does takes language (verbatim) from federal regulations put in place by one agency (NOT the legislature) to define a process for the request or protection of potentially sensitive information. The Michigan bill goes far beyond that; it gives oil and gas companies legal protection for keeping secrets from you.

Secondly, the Michigan FOIA already has a provision that allows certain exemptions for safety and security (see section Y). HB 4540 just provides special (or extra) accommodations for oil and gas companies, like Enbridge and Rover.

The bottom line is this: it’s a very bad bill. Bad for all of us. It’s quite clearly a bill conceived, promoted, and written not by Kurt Heise or his colleagues, but by Enbridge’s cadre of lawyers and lobbyists. Nor is it a bill that will protect you or your fellow Michigan citizens or our magnificent natural resources. If anything, it will just put us all at more risk.

For that reason, we’re asking you to take action. Please take a minute to write to your state representatives. A hearing by the Oversight and Ethics Committee is scheduled for Thursday. Below are links to contact information for the members of that committee. Joe Graves has been particularly responsive to constituent concerns on such matters. But please contact your representative also. Don’t allow Enbridge to write yet another of our state’s laws.

This matter is especially urgent if you are along the Enbridge, Vector, or Rover pipelines. Don’t you think you have the right to know as much as possible about the operation and condition of the pipeline that runs through your yard?

Michigan Oversight and Ethics Committee

Ed McBroom (R) Committee Chair, 108th District

Martin Howrylak (R) Majority Vice-Chair, 41st District

Joseph Graves (R) 51st District

Lana Theis (R) 42nd District

Rose Mary Robinson (D) Minority Vice-Chair, 4th District

Kristy Pagan (D) 21st District

Another Politician Betrays Michigan

Another Politician Betrays Michigan

What is it with Michigan elected officials? At a moment in time when almost everybody in the U.S. and Canada recognizes the need for heightened scrutiny of pipeline operators– especially given the failures of our federal regulators— Michigan Representative Kurt Heise of Plymouth has introduced legislation designed to allow pipeline operators to escape even more scrutiny. Keith Matheny of the Free Press has the story. It’s as if Kurt Heise has never even heard of the Marshall spill. Either that or he’s just a gutless shill for the oil and gas companies. Reminds us of some others.

If Heise is in your district, please contact him and express your extreme displeasure at his willingness to do the bidding of the company responsible for the most expensive inland oil spill in U.S. history– not to mention his shameful attempt to play us all for chumps and pass it off as as a matter of “national security” (his contact info is below). That line is total b.s. and everybody knows it. Also, you might send him a copy of the NTSB report on the Marshall spill as well. He’s clearly never seen it.

Contact info:

Kurt Heise

PHONE: 517-373-3816
TOLL FREE: 855-737-5878
EMAIL: KurtHeise@house.mi.gov

Why Do Pipelines Keep Leaking?

Why Do Pipelines Keep Leaking?

Fresh off a visit to Washington, D.C. and a visit to PHMSA, we’ve got an op-ed this week over at Vice News in which we wonder why pipelines just keep failing:

It has been five years since the Marshall disaster in Michigan — and also five years since the terrible San Bruno, California pipeline explosion that killed eight people — but federal regulators have done almost nothing to improve the safety of the nation’s existing pipelines. Partly in response to these incidents and others like them, in 2011 Congress passed the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act. Yet in the intervening time, the agency charged with implementing that bill’s provisions, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHMSA), has failed to finalize and institute any new major regulations.

You can read the full piece here.

And while you’re there, be sure to take the time to watch the excellent video report, “Pipeline Nation,” featuring our friends Carl Weimer and Alexis Bonogofsky telling the truth.

No Rover-Vector Expansions (for now)

No Rover-Vector Expansions (for now)

If you’ve been following the news this week, you’ve surely heard that ET Rover has altered its plans significantly. They’ve entered into an agreement with Vector Pipelines (a joint operation owned by Enbridge and DTE) to use existing infrastructure through much of Michigan, eliminating the need to build new pipe through a number of counties. The new plan still calls for roughly 100 miles of new pipeline construction through Lenawee, Washtenaw, and Livingston counties, where that new pipe will meet up with the existing Vector line.

Yesterday, in the face of this (seemingly) good news, we expressed our concern about previously announced plans by Vector to expand capacity by building “loop” line adjacent to the existing one. But two reporters, the excellent Keith Matheny at the Free Press and the equally excellent Beth LeBlanc at the Times Herald in St. Clair County reported late yesterday that Vector has decided to scrap its expansion plans. Here is Enbridge’s Lorraine Little:

“At this time, Vector Pipeline will not need to expand its mainline system to meet these firm transportation obligations.”

And here is DTE’s Erica Donelson:

“Currently, Vector can support the capacity requirements for Rover.”

So it appears our question from yesterday has been answered. That said, we’d just like to make a few observations in the face of this latest news:

First, we understand the jubilation of local officials and landowners upon learning of this news. There is no question that this new plan is much better for landowners than the old one. A lot of people will be spared a lot of disruption and risk. And unquestionably, they use of existing infrastructure is preferable to new construction. However, it’s worth remembering that an awful lot of landowners and communities will still be affected. We hope that all of those deeply concerned residents of Oakland, Genessee, Lapeer, St. Clair, and Macomb counties will continue to show concern for their fellow citizens in Lenawee, Washtenaw, and Livingston.

Secondly, we should also bear in mind that many of the arguments against ET Rover still stand. If you believed before that Rover was not a public necessity before, that the project will of little benefit (but significant risk) to Michiganders, and that corporations ought not to be able to take private property for their own profit, you should still believe it now. The fact that a handful of counties have been spared does not invalidate those arguments.

Lastly, we’re still a little nervous about the prospects of Vector expansions. In fact, every time a pipeline company spokesperson starts a sentence with “At this time,” our heart skips a beat (and we’re pretty sure an angel loses its wings). It might well simply be a matter of time before those plans resurface. Landowners along the Vector line are now, as a friend of ours put it, living with a second shoe dangling over their heads, waiting to drop. We hope people are dusting off and reviewing their easement agreements.

So for those reasons, we’ve decided not to celebrate this news. We’re pleased in some ways and we’re extraordinarily proud of the remarkable efforts of those citizens and local officials who put real pressure on Rover and FERC, pressure that quite clearly caused this positive change in plans. But there’s more work to be done. Perhaps those in the spared counties will consider working with and helping those counties still in Rover’s crosshairs.