Enbridge is struggling to stabilize its Line 3/93 crude oil pipeline in Walker Brook Valley’s peat lands and soggy hillside — where it never should have been built in the first place.
Enbridge took ten months to build the Line 3 tar sands pipeline 337 miles across northern Minnesota. It finished in September, 2021 and started pumping oil Oct. 1, 2021. Now, more than two years later, it’s still mucking around in Minnesota’s fragile wetlands, doing more damage as it goes.
This is the third time Enbridge has brought back its timber-plank roads and heavy equipment into Walker Brook Valley to stabilize its pipeline. The ecosystem is taking a beating.
Pipeline project marketing pitches (and regulatory permits) give the impression that sites like this will be repaired and restored as close as possible to original conditions. Don’t believe it. This site is beyond repair.
The timber roads and massive equipment compact wetlands, each return visit compounding the damage.
Check out this new drone video, which gives a good overview of the site and the damage.
For the Rule of Law to mean anything, it has to be able to hold wealthy people and large companies accountable as well as the average person. One of the sadder chapters in the Line 3 pipeline pipeline saga was the pitifully meager penalties available to hold Enbridge accountable for blatant permit violations.
Enbridge completed the pipeline two years ago. Groups of advocates still are trying to force the state to do what it should have done immediately: Hold Enbridge responsible for the environmental damage it created.
Advocates have filed a pleading in District Court in Clearwater County to enforce the one weak criminal charge the state brought against Enbridge: A misdemeanor for the unpermitted discharge of state waters. A year ago, the state and Enbridge entered an agreement, where Enbridge would admit to its wrongdoing. In return, the state said it would dismiss the charges in a year as long as Enbridge remained law abiding.
The charge is set to be dismissed this week/
Advocates say Enbridge hasn’t remained on good behavior. They have identified sites of suspected aquifer breaches that neither the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) nor Enbridge have made known publicly.
Enbridge knew or should have known about all of these breaches and done something about them.
The pleading asks the Court to enforce the misdemeanor charge: specifically to order the imprisonment of responsible Enbridge executives for 90 days or an otherwise definite term, “and to order each Enbridge executive to individually pay $1000 for each aquifer breach in Minnesota along the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline corridor.”
Court dismisses charges against LaDuke, Aubid, and Goodwin
Many people are rightfully celebrating a decision by a Minnesota District Court Judge Thursday to dismiss charges against three Indigenous woman for their resistance to the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
Winona LaDuke, Tania Aubid, and Dawn Goodwin faced several charges for “disrupting” pipeline construction in 2021 on the banks of the Mississippi River at a Line 3 construction site in Aitkin County.
Judge Leslie Metzen made a powerful statement in dismissing the charges.
“In the interests of justice the charges against these three individuals who were exercising their rights to free speech and to freely express their spiritual beliefs should be dismissed,” the order said. “To criminalize their behavior would be the crime.”
Yes, that’s a good thing to acknowledge. Yet let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture: Line 3 construction did extensive environmental damage and Enbridge has faced much less scrutiny than the water protectors who were trying to prevent the damage.
I have been cataloguing all the ways that Minnesota’s regulatory system ignored state rules and common sense to approve the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
Part of what that’s meant for me is going over old documents and finding stuff I missed.
In particular, I reread an Oct 12, 2021 letter from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to Enbridge alleging many violations of its water quality permit.
I noticed some data discrepancies. Further, the MPCA said some of the construction “resulted in physical and biological changes causing significant adverse impacts to the designated wetland beneficial uses.” I was curious to know what conditions warrant that assessment.
I emailed questions to the MPCA.
What I got back two weeks later was a reminder that the MPCA doesn’t like answering questions.
It’s about sheet pilings and a failed regulatory system
Sheet pilings laid out at a Line 3 worksite, June, 2021.
This post was written in collaboration with Waadookawaad Amikwag.
Construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline has created at least four artesian aquifer breaches – at Clearbrook, LaSalle Valley, Fond du Lac, and Moose Lake – all from the same cause: Driving sheet pilings too deep into the ground. A fifth site – Walker Brook – technically might not count as an artesian aquifer breach, but the environmental damage there is significant and needs to remain in the public eye.
Line 3’s 337-mile route went through many areas with high water tables, making it difficult to install the pipeline. If workers starting digging a trench, it would quickly fill with water.
Construction workers would drive 30-foot-tall sheet pilings into the ground, one on each side of the planned trench. The goal was to block groundwater flow into the trench so it would be dry enough to work.
However, Line 3 also crosses lands with shallow artesian aquifers. These are areas where groundwater is held underground, under pressure, by an impervious layer of soil, such as clay. Break the clay seal with a sheet piling and the water rushes to the surface.
Enbridge either didn’t do its homework on artesian aquifer locations on Line 3’s route, or it chose to be willfully ignorant of them. Either way, it kept repeating the same kind of damage.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) failed to intervene effectively. It wrote a weak permit. It didn’t even know the amount or location of the sheet pilings Enbridge used for the project.
Randall Doneen, Section Manager for the DNRs’ Conservation Assistance and Regulation unit, wrote Healing Minnesota Stories: “We do not have sheet piling locations across the entire line. When we investigate specific locations we get the sheet piling information on that location from the company.”
This post written in collaboration with Waadookawaad Amikwag
Sheet pilings laid out at a Line 3 worksite, June, 2021.
The following summarizes the causes and impacts of aquifer breaches resulting from construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline. This post will be updated when new information becomes available.
Line 3 construction ended more than 19 months ago, Oct. 1, 2021. State regulators have been slow to announce all the environmental damage that occurred. They say they don’t release information until they finish their investigations.
A volunteer group called Wadookawaad Amikwag (Anishinaabemowin for “Those Who Help Beaver”) has been concerned about state agencies’ seeming lack of urgency and the lack of public information available. Volunteers are investigating on their own.
The multinational, behemoth, energy transportation company Enbridge must be paying its PR department overtime.
Waadookawaad Amikwag (Anishinaabemowin for Those Who Help Beaver) broke the story this week that construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline breached an aquifer near Moose Lake. That brings the number Line 3-related aquifer breaches to four, and that’s not counting environmental damage done to Walker Brook.
Local and national media have picked up the story, from the Seattle Times to CBS News.
Here’s what Enbridge has been telling other media about what happened at Moose Lake.
healingmnstories.wordpress.com 