OPINION

Hold oil pipelines liable for full cleanup

Until they see it for themselves, skeptics tend to believe “Blue Water Area” is some sort of Convention and Tourism Bureau puffery intended to exaggerate the color and clarity of Lake Huron and the St. Clair River. When those visitors from less beautiful places finally arrive on our shores, their jaws often drop in wonder. They begin by whispering to themselves, “It really is blue.” Then they tell their friends.

It seems we have more to teach them. It really is water.

By some wonder of federal government rule-making and bureaucracy, the Great Lakes and their connecting channels have somehow become dry land. Certain things in and under the water — oil pipelines specifically — are technically not offshore facilities, despite all that blue water.

U.S. Sens. Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow want to change that. They’ve asked the federal Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over petroleum pipelines, to classify all pipelines that cross beneath the Great Lakes as offshore facilities. The designation is more than obvious semantics.

Under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the owners and operators of onshore oil pipelines and other petroleum facilities are liability for only up to $634 million in cleanup costs. The Oil Pollution Act was passed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

The act makes pipeline owners liable for all costs, down to the last dime, for cleaning up a petroleum spill resulting from offshore facilities.

Enbridge estimates that a midwinter spill from its Line 5 at the Straits of Mackinac would cost $1 billion to clean up. Critics scoff at the estimate, pointing out that cleaning up Enbridge’s 2010 Kalamazoo River mess cost more than $1.2 billion. After crossing the Straits from the Upper Peninsula to the Lower Peninsula, Line 5 continues to Marysville, where it crosses the St. Clair River to Ontario.

If the Department of Transportation does not reclassify the underwater pipelines, Peters says he will introduce legislation in Congress to do so.

We think he needs to do more than that.

The Kalamazoo River spill suggests Congress needs to rethink all the liability limits in the Oil Pollution Act, both for cleaning up all on- and offshore oil spills and for covering the losses of private parties harmed by those incidents.