In the soft light of a cloudy day I walked the beach area along the Straits of Mackinac, the waves coming ashore within feet of me, the forest trees just beyond the riparian sands between the water and forest. It is a peaceful place where only a few people wander the lakefront in Wilderness State Park in Michigan. You feel at one with nature. Yet it is within a mile of where the Line 5 oil pipeline passes beneath the waters where I watch ships passing, taking their cargo from Lake Michigan to Huron and back the other way.

As part of our documentary, The Sweetwater Seas – North America’s Great Lakes, one part of the film covers the story of Line 5, a segment we aim to release this fall as a stand-alone 30-minute documentary. Our approach in telling the Line 5 story revolves around the rights of indigenous people in northern Michigan, who have both a moral and legal right to clean water in the Straits of Mackinac and elsewhere. Their rights to full use of the land and water, both inland and in the Great Lakes, was established in the 1836 treaty that created the state of Michigan. This is the backdrop of lawsuits that seek to shut down the aging pipeline—the treaty guarantees that the local environment will be preserved to use by indigenous people, but an oil spill in the Straits would destroy the resource for the five bands of Odawa and Chippewa people who live around the Straits and are directly impacted by Line 5.

The Line 5 oil pipeline is owned by Enbridge Energy, a Calgary-based pipeline company that uses the pipeline to deliver crude oil from Alberta to refineries at Sarnia, Ontario. The pipeline runs within a mile of Lake Superior, then crosses the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, often within a half-mile of Lake Michigan, before it splits into two lines to traverse the lake bottom at the Straits of Mackinac. The two lines rejoin on the south side of the Straits and continue south through the state of Michigan before crossing beneath the St. Clair River at the southern tip of Lake Huron. In short, the pipeline carries Canadian oil to Canadian refineries, risking tribal and United States waters along the way.

Line 5 is the only oil pipeline that sits beneath the water anywhere in the Great Lakes. The two 20-inch pipes lying on the base of the Straits of Mackinac were built in 1953 with an expected lifespan of 50 years. They still carry approximately 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas daily through some of the most pristine waters in the lakes, the waters that connect Lakes Michigan and Huron. The powerful currents in the Straits flow in both directions, which shift at different depths, so a rupture at the bottom of the Straits would literally be impossible to contain. The pipeline was initially constructed on a series of sandbag supports that have since washed away on many places, leaving the pipes hanging without support for expanses as wide as 200 feet. Enbridge has been replacing the sandbags, but long stretches of the pipeline remain unsupported or inadequately braced. Similarly, the pipe shielding is corroded, and the outer protective cladding is simply gone in many locations. Even if the pipeline was in perfect repair, its position at the bottom of the Straits still represents an untenable risk. In April, 2018, an anchor dragged across the line, and from the limited video that is available, it seems that it struck the pipe just 20 feet from an unsupported area—perilously close to causing a disastrous rupture.

And it is impossible to overstate the extent of the potential catastrophe. In just a matter of hours, a spill from Line 5 would spread oil across as much as 700 square miles of Lakes Michigan and Huron. Although there are “fail-safe” shutoffs, actually shutting Line 5 is not a matter of closing a valve at the Straits—the shutdown has to begin in Superior, Wisconsin, hundreds of miles away, and then follow a sequence moving east until the last valve, located at the Straits, is closed. In short, once the rupture is detected, oil will continue to spill for at least a half-hour more. In the real world, several hours is more likely, especially if the pipe breaks while the Straits are sealed with ice. The risks are simply too great to accept any longer.

The documentary presents these risks, and while we advocate for immediately shutting down Line 5, the film does not ignore the arguments for maintaining operations. For example, if the oil is no longer flowing through the pipe, it will be delivered to the refineries by some other means, and the towns through which tanker cars of crude will be rolling also have a stake in the debate. If the flow of oil is interrupted, refinery workers likewise have an interest if their jobs are furloughed as a result. The film presents these issues as well. Enbridge has proposed drilling a tunnel beneath the Straits, and the Republican leadership of the States of Michigan signed a deal for construction before leaving office last January. The incoming Democratic administration has attempted to put an end to the agreement. Enbridge says the tunnel will take between two and five years to complete, but environmental and civil engineers have argued that the timeline is much longer. However long construction would take, for the duration the risk of the pipeline rupturing will remain as it is today. In other words, the current politics surrounding Line 5 may be more complicated than a simple yes/no question, although for the Native American bands who are pressing their case for ownership of the waters in the Straits of Mackinac, the issue is simple: Shut it down. Now.

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