Line 5 pipeline. Image: Enbridge.
By Logan Clark
Enbridge Inc. recently intervened in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service, one in which the Sierra Club claims the agency failed to review the company’s oil pipeline that stretches below the Straits of Mackinac.
The 1,000-mile pipeline, known as Line 5, runs from northern Wisconsin through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, south across the Straits of Mackinac and then into Canada via the Bay City area in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. It is part of the company’s Lakehead System which brings petroleum from northwestern Canada to southern Ontario through the Great Lakes states.
It also runs under the Huron-Manistee National Forest in Michigan. That is why the Sierra Club has sued, claiming that the Forest Service violated federal law by issuing a special permit to the company.
Reissued in December 2014, the special permit allows Line 5 to continue existing under the national forest without considering its environmental effects, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Bay City in January says that the pipeline has never undergone federal environmental analysis since it was constructed in 1953.
Judge Thomas Ludington on Wednesday granted Enbridge’s request to intervene and be represented as a third party because the decision affects the company.
Graham White, Enbridge manager of business communications and public affairs, declined to comment before the court’s decision. Jason Manshum, company specialist for U.S. public affairs liquids operations and projects, referred to a statement that the company issued in early February. It says that under federal law the special permit renewal does not require the kind of review Sierra Club is demanding.
The company feels its specific interests may not be adequately represented in court by the Forest Service and the decision could jeopardize the existence of Line 5 entirely, according to Marvin Roberson, a forest ecologist for the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club decided not to challenge the intervention and expected the judge to grant it, Roberson said. “Even though we are not challenging it, they still found it necessary to make a 25-page write-up defending the intervention.”
After a small leak from the 60-year-old pipeline in the Upper Peninsula north of Manistique in early December 2014, the Sierra Club expressed concerns that the line threatens the environment. The environmental group said that especially at risk are areas near the Au Sable River and under the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas.
The Sierra Club feels that Enbridge should never have been granted the special permit in the first place, said Anne Woiwode, conservation director of the organization’s Michigan Chapter.
“The National Environmental Policy Act was enacted in 1970, and despite that, the Forest Service had considered this pipeline to be ‘categorically excluded’ from environmental review based, in effect, on the pipeline having been in place for so long,” Woiwode said.
The Sierra Club argues that the Forest Service is wrong in excluding Line 5 from an environmental impact statement required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Agencies may grant exemption in certain circumstances, as was done to the pipeline.
The lawsuit says that the exemption isn’t justified, even though the law went into effect almost two decades after the pipeline was built.
“It is indefensible for the federal government to say that no environmental analysis is needed for a pipeline carrying a half-million barrels of oil a day across the Great Lakes, through a national forest and under numerous sensitive areas,” Woiwode said.
The Forest Service disagrees, stating in the permit’s decision memo, “that there are no extraordinary circumstances which may result in significant individual or cumulative effects on the quality of the environment. This project is consistent with the Forests’ approved land and Resource Management Plan.”
Enbridge also owns a pipeline that leaked almost a million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River watershed in 2010. It is the record for the largest and most costly inland oil spill in U.S. history. The cleanup is still underway.
“We consider litigation only as a last resort,” Woiwode said. “Sierra Club has a motto of using ‘all legal means’ to advance our priorities.”