The New Mass Extinction: There’s A Pipeline Ready To Burst Under The Great Lakes [View all]

[KamaAina]

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/08/17/tnme-line-five/

Beneath the Great Lakes, there is a ticking time bomb that threatens one-fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. That time bomb comes in the form of a pipeline owned by the Canadian company Enbridge.

The pipeline known as “Line 5” is the subject of a new documentary produced by Motherboard/Vice. The documentary uncovers what led to the creation of what could turn out to be one of the world’s worst man-made environmental disasters....

Motherboard correspondent Spencer Chumbley went to Michigan to investigate the situation, and the research is alarming. If just one of the pipelines ruptured, it would result in a spill of 1.5 million gallons of oil—and that’s if Enbridge, the company that owns them, is able to fix the pipeline immediately. UMich research scientist Dave Schwab says, “I can’t imagine another place in the Great Lakes where it’d be more devastating to have an oil spill.”

Enbridge, the company that runs the pipelines, insists they are safe. But Enbridge does not have a particularly inspiring record, with more than 800 spills between 1999 and 2010, totalling 6.8 million gallons of spilled oil. In 2010, its pipeline 6B ruptured in the Kalamazoo River. The nation’s focus was pulled by Deepwater Horizon at the time, but the Kalamazoo River spill became the nation’s biggest inland oil spill.