“What We Don’t Know About Line 5 — What Troubles Us About Enbridge” (August 20, 2020)

With panelists Edward E. Timm, Skip Pruss, Ian Bund, and Bryan Newland, followed by an interactive conversation

It is becoming more clear every day there are large gaps in what we know about Line 5, the oil pipeline that traverses the Upper Peninsula and crosses the Straits of Mackinac. On Thursday, August 20, we rebroadcasted parts of a new video from the nonprofit group For Love of Water (FLOW) called “Securing a Brighter Future Without Line 5 or an Oil Tunnel.” Four speakers — an engineer, a lawyer and former state administrator, a venture capitalist, and a tribal chairman — talked about the many liabilities of Line 5 and its owner, the Canadian corporation Enbridge. The panelists are:

• Dr. Edward E. Timm, PhD, PE, Retired Senior Scientist, Dow Chemical Company

• Stanley “Skip” Pruss, former Director of the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor, and Economic Growth and former Chief Energy Officer for Michigan

• Ian Bund, Senior Advisor, Plymouth Growth

• Bryan Newland, Chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Community

We’ll then built on their presentations with more information and discussion. The more we get into the Line 5 issue, the more complications keep tumbling out. For Enbridge it is an effort to keep the pipeline open at any cost. For the people of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ontario, these are our waters, our lives.

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More resources

• Slide show prepared by UPEC summarizing main points of panelists, plus actions you can take (PDF document)

Resources from FLOW’s “Securing a Brighter Future” webinar

• Video recording of our Aug. 5 Line 5 webinar. Note: Be sure to enter password: i=#1q$QB. And here’s a tip: You can copy links from the right-side chat box into your Internet browser to access key content shared during the webinar.

• Slides shown by our presenters with active hyperlinks added on the slides to source content.

• Ed Timm’s recommendation on engineering failures -- The books of Henry Petroski. 

• An Analysis of The Enbridge Financial Assurances Offered to the State of Michigan On Matters Related To The Operation of The Enbridge Line 5 Pipeline At the Straits of Mackinac. Prepared for the State of Michigan by American Risk Management Resources Network, LLC, October 29, 2019.

• Gov. Whitmer: Enbridge dodging responsibility for potential Line 5 spill – Great Lakes Now

• Ian Bund opinion in Bloomberg Law: INSIGHT: Great Lakes Face Continuing Threat From Pipeline

• Bryan Newland op-ed in the Detroit Free Press: Enbridge Line 5 is Michigan's next ecological disaster

• Liz Kirkwood op-ed in the Detroit News: Opinion: Kalamazoo oil spill 10 years ago taught Enbridge nothing

• Frank Zinn on Line 6B: An Enbridge Oil Spill on My Grandparents' Farm - FLOW

• Enbridge: Damage to Enbridge Line 5 pipeline may have come from company’s own contractors - mlive.com

• Bridge Magazine: Michigan judge orders temporary Enbridge Line 5 shutdown

• Jim Olson: Turning the Spotlight on Line 5 in the Great Lakes - FLOW

• FLOW: FLOW, Environmental, and Tribal Groups Urge US Army Corps to Reject Enbridge Line 5 Tunnel Permit

• Take Action – FLOW: Urge Michigan's Leaders to Shut Down the “Significantly Damaged” Line 5 Right Now

“The Power Behind the Power Lines: How UP Electric Utilities Work”(July 30, 2020)

Mike Furmanski, the superintendent of Escanaba’s electric utility, explains the ins and outs of running the City of Escanaba’s utility, and the different types of utilities—investor owned, cooperatives, municipal—and the bulk power transmission system in Michigan, called MISO, plus other networks that allow us to receive seamless electrical service to our homes.

The second part of this episode of The Energy Show is “Bone of Contention: Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac.” Your UPEC hosts, Horst Schmidt and Evan Zimmermann, wind through the current legal wrangles between the State of Michigan and Enbridge, the pipeline owner.

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Intentional Communities: Living Sustainably with a Shared Purpose (July 23, 2020)

This UPEC “This Is It!” livestream featured Professor Chelsea Schelly of Michigan Technological University, who discussed intentional communities — planned residential living communities designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and collaboration through shared technologies, economies, and activities of daily life.  Several intentional communities were offered as examples of the diversity of forms they can take.

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