Pipelines have been a hot topic in Michigan in the last few years. Very recent developments suggest the issue is intensifying. Canada’s Enbridge is part of a proposal to install about 600 miles of new, interstate natural gas pipelines, about 150 miles of which would run through Michigan. Besides arousing environmental concerns over a possible pipeline rupture, the proposal affects homeowners whose properties were not long ago disrupted by another Enbridge project.
Concerns have also grown recently about the company’s 61-year old oil pipeline that runs through the Straits of Mackinac. Last week, a University of Michigan study explored several gloomy scenarios if that line broke.
Beth Wallace, a board member for the Pipeline Safety Trust, an organization that promotes pipeline safety “through education, advocacy, increased access to information and partnerships” joins us.
Wallace is also the Community Outreach Regional Coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation at that group’s Great Lakes Regional Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has been the lead organizer for that center’s response to the Kalamazoo River tar sands spill,
This is a University of Michigan computer model of where oil would go if a pipeline at the Straits of Mackinac ruptured:
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