Oil Beneath the Waves
The Great Lakes and one of the many unsung battles of the climate crisis.
In 2010, an oil pipeline in western Michigan burst, spilling more than one million gallons of oil into Talmadge Creek, a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. It was the largest inland oil spill in the history of the Midwest, and according to the NTSB, it would become the costliest onshore oil cleanup in US history. That tragic accident set the stage for a fight nearly 300 miles away beneath the waters where the great Michigan and Huron lakes meet.
Enbridge Energy, a Calgary-based oil and natural gas company owns the world’s longest network of pipelines transporting crude oil and liquids throughout North America. One of those pipelines ran along Talmadge Creek. Another runs beneath the Straits of Mackinac connecting an oil network from the Upper Peninsula to the Lower Peninsula. This pipeline is called Line 5.
My wife and I moved to Michigan in 2011, completely unaware of the oil spill that had happened a year earlier. The national coverage it had received was fleeting and missed our radar completely. It would be a couple more years before I would hear about Line 5, the controversy surrounding it, and the efforts to shut it down.
In the fight against the climate crisis, victories are often small; their permanence…
