Don’t Create the Source of Disaster

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Aug. 22, 2026

Enbridge’s Line 5 was first built in 1953, running across the Upper Peninsula, under the Straits of Mackinac, and down the spine of the Lower Peninsula until it ends in Sarnia, Ontario. Most of us paid little attention to it—shame on us—until there was an anchor strike on that underwater pipeline that made us realize there was the possibility of something very, very bad happening. So, Enbridge, way back in 2018, proposed building a tunnel beneath the Straits for their beloved pipeline.

Then more people started paying attention.

First a little background. The United States has the largest petroleum product pipeline network in the world. We have an astonishing 2.8 million miles of pipeline crisscrossing the country. It mostly carries natural gas and most of that mileage is local, lines running into homes and businesses. You might have such a pipeline running right under your backyard. The pipelines also carry oil and other petroleum products.

Go online and ask for a map of pipelines in the country, and it looks like someone spilled a plate of multi-colored spaghetti on it. You might be surprised to learn there are nearly 68,000 miles of pipeline in Michigan alone, and Enbridge has only 930 miles of it. Grand Traverse County’s natural gas is provided by DTE lines; no Enbridge natural gas comes here.

The Enbridge product starts in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, and is transported by other pipelines to Superior, Wisconsin, where it transfers to Line 5 and starts its journey, with roughly 540,000 barrels (22.7 million gallons) a day of crude product flowing through its 30-inch-diameter pipeline.

The natural gas liquids are stripped out at the Rapid River Terminal not far from Escanaba, and the result provides 65 percent of the U.P.’s propane, according to Enbridge.

Some oil makes it to refineries in Detroit and Ohio, but the vast majority of the product ends up at Sarnia’s petrochemical complex in Ontario. So, product extracted from Canada, goes into a Canadian-owned pipeline and mostly ends up in Canada for use by Canadians, but the pipeline runs exclusively through Michigan whose residents get all the risk. And there is risk.

You must think Enbridge surely pays the state plenty for the right to do this. They pay their share of taxes, and they’ve paid some hefty settlements for line mishaps, but they pay not a cent to run the pipelines—not a lease fee nor a royalty.

Ah, yes, the risk. The percentage of pipeline leaks and accidents, given the millions of miles and remarkable amount of product surging through them, is small. Unfortunately, the raw numbers and consequences are not.

According to the Federal Register, the U.S. averages about 370 leaks of hazardous liquids annually, but it bumps up to 678 incidents per year when we include natural gas transmission lines, or 1.7 incidents every day.

The problem here is not the number of problems—most of the leaks are small and controllable—but the very real potential for catastrophe. Michigan has already experienced exactly that phenomenon.

In 2010, just outside Marshall, Michigan, Enbridge Line 6B ruptured and released at least a million gallons of crude product into Talmadge Creek, which then found its way into the Kalamazoo River. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), 1,500 acres of wetlands and 38 miles of waterways were severely damaged, thousands of amphibious critters were killed, injured, or had to be rescued, and sections of the river had to be closed for two years while clean-up efforts were undertaken.

Enbridge, which either misunderstood their own warning system or ignored it, continued to pump oil through the ruptured line for another 17 hours and ended up paying $1.2 billion in clean-up and restitution costs. They “solved” the problem by replacing Line 6B with a bigger pipeline.

It’s not like petroleum products easily vanish into the environment. There are still environmental consequences—oil blobs showing up, diseased fish—from the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989. A spill under the Straits would be more than a generational issue; it would be a disaster expanding lifetimes.

Tribal nations through which Line 5 travels strongly oppose the pipeline in general and the tunnel specifically. Governor Gretchen Whitmer was once a strong opponent, but the state regulatory bodies approved the tunnel project in spite of her opposition. The Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit, but the Michigan Supreme Court, unlike the other groups that analyzed the thing, rightly decided the regulators had not fully done their job considering environmental concerns or others, and now we start again.

It’s long past time for Enbridge to figure out how to get their product to their plants without crossing the Straits. The best way to avoid what could be an absolutely cataclysmic disaster is to never create the source of it.