Breaking: Blockade Launched Against Enbridge Line 9 Pipeline

20th May 2014. A group of area res­i­dents have block­ad­ed the access road to an exposed sec­tion of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline, begin­ning at 7am this morn­ing. They say they will stay for at least twelve hours, one hour for every thou­sand anom­alies Enbridge has report­ed to exist on the line. These com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers turned away Enbridge employ­ees who were sched­uled to do work on Line 9 in prepa­ra­tion for it to car­ry tox­ic dilut­ed bitu­men from the Alber­ta Tar Sands. This par­tic­u­lar work site is adja­cent to the Bronte creek, a major water­way flow­ing to Lake Ontario, the water source for more than ten mil­lion peo­ple.

“Enbridge calls these devel­op­ments integri­ty digs,” said Danielle Boissineau, one of the block­aders, “but to any­one watch­ing the Line 9 issue, it’s clear Enbridge has no integri­ty. This work on the line is just a band-aid, a flim­sy patch over the most out­ra­geous flaws in the Line 9 plan.” [Danielle notes that a record of just some of Enbridge’s false or mis­lead­ing state­ments is avail­able on the Enbridge Lies face­book page

“Line 9 has near­ly 13,000 struc­tur­al weak­ness­es along its length” said Bri­an Suther­land, a Burling­ton res­i­dent. “And yet Enbridge is only doing a few hun­dred integri­ty digs. Enbridge has been deny­ing the prob­lems with the pipe for years, and they still refuse to do the hydro­sta­t­ic test­ing request­ed by the province. Are we real­ly sup­posed to trust Enbridge when they tell us that this time they’ll do it right?”

 

Many of the block­aders point to the dis­as­trous spill from Enbridge’s line 6b into the Kala­ma­zoo Riv­er in Michi­gan in 2010, where mil­lions of litres of oil spilled and have so far proven impos­si­ble to clean up. But many of them empha­size that their oppo­si­tion to Line 9 goes beyond safe­ty con­cerns.

“This is not about pipelines ver­sus rail; it’s about the Tar Sands,” said Danielle Boissineau. “It’s the dirt­i­est oil in the world: it’s not worth the destruc­tion it takes to pro­duce, it’s not worth the risk to our water­sheds to trans­port, and we def­i­nite­ly can’t afford the car­bon in our atmos­phere when it’s burned. At every step of the process, the Tar Sands out­sources the risks onto our com­mu­ni­ties and poi­sons water­ways like the Athabas­ca Riv­er and the Bronte creek while com­pa­nies like Enbridge get rich.”