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.
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.”