Bad River watershed, saved from mining, faces more toxic threats

Toxic politics just won't leave Northwest Wisconsin alone

You may remember the fight to save the Bad River watershed from open-pit mining aimed there by ex-Gov. Walker and his special interest sidekick and now GOP Congressional-candidate Tom Tiffany.

Now the Bad River tribe is beginning to litigate to save the same area from an aging Enbridge oil pipeline 

which could turn the land and waters there into a toxic wasteland: 

Engineers who built the pipeline expected it to last 50 years. Now 16 years past its expiration date, no major replacements have been made. On the stretch of Line 5 that includes the Bad River Reservation, Enbridge identified 844 “anomalies,” referring to cracks or features resembling cracks in 2011, according to data acquired by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) in 2017. NWF also found that Line 5 itself has leaked at least 29 times since 1968, spilling more than a million total gallons of oil.Many Great Lakes residents still remember 

Enbridge’s most infamous disasterin the region, when another pipeline, Line 6B, released more than 843,000 gallons of heavy tar sands oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. The 2010 leak was the costliest oil spill in U.S. history as well as one of the nation’s largest inland spills, all made worse by the fact that Enbridge’s own failure detection methods failed.