Wisconsin Tribe Fights to Remove 71-Year-Old Oil Pipeline from Pristine Land

“It’s an accident waiting to happen,” Robert Blanchard, chairman of the Bad River tribe, said of the meander.

The soft-spoken Blanchard, who goes by the nickname Buzz, considered the consequences of that deterioration from his desk at the Chief Blackbird Center in New Odanah on a rainy summer afternoon. New Odanah, a settlement of approximately 500 people, was built in the early 1960s after a flood took out much of Odanah, the reservation’s original village.

Researchers view the move to New Odanah as an early and successful example of managed retreat: communities moving to higher ground due to severe rainstorms or rising seas. However, some tribal members say the move from the river was yet another forced relocation.

Blanchard recalls how as a young man he and a friend floated along “Mashkiiziibii,” the Medicine River, or Bad River, from far upstream of the meander to the river’s end at Lake Superior. He continues to collect medicinal plants from the river and nearby wetlands.

Author and former Bad River spokesman Mark Anthony Rolo once described the reservation as “small, with a modest casino, and always on the verge of going bankrupt.” Rolo, who died in 2020, made that observation nearly a decade ago when his tribe was fighting another multinational corporation, Cline Group, which sought to blast one of the largest open-pit iron-ore mines in the world near the headwaters of the Bad River.

In 2015, Cline’s Gogebic Taconite subsidiary withdrew its application for the mine.

The tribe’s response to a new threat remains the same. In March, Enbridge offered the tribal nation $80 million if it would drop its ongoing lawsuit against the company.

“Our homeland, our treaty rights, and way of life are not for sale,” Blanchard wrote in response.

Enbridge’s spokeswoman Juli Kellner dismissed concerns of a potential spill.

“Safety is the very foundation of our business at Enbridge, and prevention is the primary focus of our pipeline safety strategy,” Kellner said. “In addition to our industry-leading design and construction standards, every day, our inline pipeline inspection and monitoring programs ensure multiple layers of safety.”

‘Substantial and Unacceptable Adverse Impacts’

In April, the U.S. Department of Justice weighed in on Enbridge’s appeal of the Bad River Line 5 lawsuit. The agency reiterated that the Canadian company has been “consciously trespassing on tribal land” and characterized the $5.1 million award to the tribe as a “paltry amount” for Enbridge’s “ill-gotten gains.”

However, the Justice Department gave credence to Enbridge’s argument that a 1977 pipeline treaty between the U.S. and Canada must be honored.

A ruling on the case by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is anticipated in the coming months. Meanwhile, Enbridge is seeking to reroute Line 5 around the Bad River reservation with a new, 41-mile section of pipe that would skirt just south of the reservation.

The reroute, under consideration by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, would pass through the same Bad River watershed as the existing pipeline, and the tribe opposes it.

“It still can have very significant water quality impacts to the reservation,” Naomi Tillison, the tribe’s natural resources director, said.

“I think there’s other options,” Blanchard said, noting that other pipelines in Enbridge’s “Lakehead System” could transport oil from Superior to Sarnia. One such pipeline is Line 78, a pipeline from Pontiac, Illinois, to Sarnia, Ontario, completed in 2015 as a replacement to Line 6B after the Kalamazoo River spill.

“They should have gone through Canada in the first place instead of bringing it down to our reservation,” Blanchard said of the decision in the 1950s to have the pipeline pass through Wisconsin and Michigan before re-entering Canada in Ontario.

Enbridge’s Kellner said the company has “no viable alternatives for transporting a substantial amount of the Line 5 volumes to the Upper Midwest and Canada as demand for petroleum and petroleum products remains high, and pipelines in the region are operating at or near capacity.”

“Shutting down Line 5 would cause an immediate shortage, and resulting higher prices, in the transportation fuels and other petroleum products refined in the region,” she added.

However, written testimony provided by Neil Earnest, a consultant hired by Enbridge and submitted in federal court in January 2022, concluded if Line 5 were shut down, gasoline prices would increase by just half a penny per gallon in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Kellner said that Line 5 is unique in that it transports both crude oil and natural gas liquids, which are refined into propane.

“Line 78 is not a viable option as it is not able to transport natural gas liquids,” Kellner said. “In addition, the line is substantially full.”

But a 2021 report published by Environmental Defense concluded that gas produced in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia could provide an alternate source of natural gas liquids for refineries in Sarnia.

“If Line 5 was shut down, the market would adjust,” Tillison said. “We think [the] Army Corps should be taking a harder look at alternatives.”

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials voiced concerns about the proposed reroute in written comments submitted to the Army Corps in the spring of 2022.

Tera Fong with EPA’s water division in the upper Midwest reminded the Army Corps in March 2022 that the Kakagon-Bad River Sloughs wetland complex is an aquatic resource of national importance and a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar treaty, giving it added protections.

“We believe the project, as currently proposed, ‘will result in substantial and unacceptable adverse impacts’ on the Bad River and the Kakagon-Bad River Sloughs wetland complex,” Debra Shore, an EPA regional administrator and Great Lakes National Program manager, wrote the following month.

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment on whether its concerns about the proposed reroute have been addressed.

The Army Corps said it continues to communicate with all interested parties, including the EPA, to address issues raised about the permit application.

“We are evaluating all methods to avoid and minimize adverse impacts associated with the proposed discharges of dredged and/or fill material in waters of the U.S., including wetlands, to the maximum extent practicable,” Bill Sande, a project manager in the agency’s regulatory division, said in a written statement.

A March 2022 letter to the Army Corps by then-chairman Wiggins noted that the Bad River tribe retains rights to hunt, fish and gather on the reservation, and in surrounding territories ceded to the U.S. government, through treaties signed in 1837, 1842 and 1854.

Ed Leoso, hatchery foreman for the Bad River tribe, said an oil spill anywhere in the Bad River watershed would jeopardize all those rights.

“It would be catastrophic,” Leoso said, standing near the boat launch of the tribe’s fish hatchery, which stocks millions of walleye into nearby lakes and streams each year. “It would pretty much destroy the river.”

Leoso said oil accumulating on the river bottom would be particularly harmful for wild rice.

“Once that oil accumulates on the bottom—you know, there’s seed down there—who knows when that’ll come back up again, if ever,” he said.

“That’s our main food source,” he added, looking out on the wetlands. “Everybody’s going to be going down here in a couple

Original Story at insideclimatenews.org