Messy Business

The Real Tunnel Vision: Profit, Power, and the Great Lakes at Risk

This is not a tunnel story.

Last month, you may have seen the news uncovered by Oil & Water Don’t Mix about Enbridge’s shady contractors. One outfit, Barnard Construction Co., has deep ties with the Trump administration—a troublesome fact given White House plans to fast-track permitting for fossil fuel projects, perhaps even including Enbridge’s preposterous Line 5 tunnel. Barnard Construction also appears to have engaged in some pretty shifty labor practices and performed some rather shoddy construction work in recent years.

As it turns out, I have a little bit of first-hand experience with Enbridge contractors. The notorious Enbridge Line 6B pipeline that ruptured into the Kalamazoo River crosses my backyard here in the northern portion of Oakland County. My wife and I watched for months—years, actually—as crews working for Enbridge cut down our trees and tore through our property during their “replacement” project. We also watched, and documented, much of their shabby work and their mishaps in our backyard and elsewhere along the line.

On our property, the Enbridge contractors carelessly mixed topsoil and subsoil. On the property adjacent to ours, they had to dig up and replace a long section of dented pipe that they’d dragged across a boulder; they’d already buried it before tests revealed the damage. In Livingston County, they discharged oily water from a hydro test straight into Ore Creek, an act for which the DEQ slapped them with 11 permit violations. Further west in Ceresco, a massive crane toppled over, landing mere feet away from a home. After pipeline construction, the firm hired to do restoration did such a poor job that a second (local) company had to come in and re-do their work along almost the entire 200-mile route. Ten years later, I still hear from landowners whose properties are not fully or properly restored.

Line 6B construction, Groveland Township, MI, 2012

I don’t mean to suggest that all the firms contracted to replace Line 6B were somehow suspicious. Any large-scale project is going to have its snafus and accidents (permit violations are another matter altogether!). And I want to be very careful not to disparage the workers themselves. I spoke with them almost daily and found them generally to be serious professionals who took pride in their work. But they were also clearly under tremendous pressure from Enbridge to complete the job in a hurry—every second lost is a gallon of oil not pumped, after all—and haste makes for sloppy work. Still, the replacement project dragged on far, far longer than Enbridge had planned. We were initially told it would take just four months. It took more than two years.

One point here is simply this: pipeline construction is a very messy business, and assurances and permit conditions aside, the messes don’t always get cleaned up. Often, they get made worse. And while it’s one thing to make a mess of my private property, it’s quite another to make a mess of the Straits of Mackinac, which belong to all of us. Even if tunnel construction were to proceed as normal—as if there even is a “normal” for such a harebrained venture—let’s not kid ourselves: it’s going to be a giant shitshow. It will cause both short-term and lasting harm in ways we can and cannot anticipate. Screwups and accidents will inevitably happen. The terms of the permits will be violated. There will be unexpected delays and the whole affair will take a lot longer than Enbridge’s ever-shifting timelines promise. All so a private company can continue feeding dirty oil to toxic refineries in Canada. How in the world can anyone believe all of that is in the public interest?

But I said this isn’t a tunnel story. What the Barnard Construction revelation called to mind for me wasn’t just my own experience but something else entirely: the Bechtel Corporation. Maybe you’ve heard that name before. Bechtel Corporation is the mega-contractor that Lakehead hired to construct Line 5 in 1953. One of the world’s largest contractors, they’ve built a lot of other things, too, all over the world: pipelines, shipyards, military bases, and nuclear facilities.

Enbridge is especially fond of pointing out that Bechtel is the outfit that built the famous Hoover Dam way back in the 1930s, which is true. However, what Enbridge fails to mention is Bechtel’s long history of callous labor exploitation. What was then called the Boulder Dam project became as infamous for the cruel treatment of the workers who built it as it became famous for its audacity and scale. From the very beginning, the enterprise was beset by accidents, fatalities, strikes, and constant labor unrest. Things were so bad that in 1935, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior launched a federal investigation into Bechtel’s labor practices, which included driving workers ruthlessly in the sweltering southwestern heat, creating unsafe and unsanitary working conditions (nearly 100 men died working on the project), paying workers in scrip that could only be used at company stores, and practicing various forms of ugly racial discrimination.

Despite that history, Bechtel has made billions, most of it from fat government contracts. And they continue to work on mega-projects all over the world. They even built the beleaguered Palisades Nuclear Facility on the shore of Lake Michigan near South Haven back in the 1970s. Shoddy work there earned them a $300 million lawsuit from Consumer’s Energy for delivering “defective equipment.” Great Lakes water protectors should take heed: with the support of Governor Whitmer and millions of dollars from President Trump’s Department of Energy, the Palisades plant is set to re-open this fall. And if a disaster were to strike there—a now-hobbled EPA certainly won’t be keeping watch—Bechtel would stand to profit from that, too. Perversely, they’ve made more billions cleaning up nuclear accident sites, including Three Mile Island and Chornobyl.

Page spread from “Bechtel’s 35 Years in Michigan,” promotional pamphlet, 1988

The secret to Bechtel’s success is influencing, cultivating, and exploiting cozy relationships with Republican administrations. In fact, Bechtel’s corporate offices have been a revolving door for high-level government officials for decades. When Line 5 was built, President Dwight Eisenhower was corporate President Steven Bechtel’s golfing buddy. Since then, Directors of the CIA, the head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, a Secretary of State, Secretaries of Defense, and other powerful figures have all worked directly for or on behalf of Bechtel. If you’re of a certain age, you probably know many of their names: Weinberger, Shultz, Rumsfeld. Those relationships have facilitated Bechtel’s tawdry profiteering ventures in the Middle East and elsewhere, their meddling in foreign affairs, and their cruel water privatization schemes.

So when I say that pipeline construction is a messy business, I also mean that it’s often ethically messy, the stuff of backroom deals, cronyism and collusion, and even bribery and kickbacks. U.S. geopolitical interests and Bechtel corporate interests have been virtually indistinguishable for decades. And there’s a straight line from Bechtel to Barnard Construction, not only because they’ve partnered on other ventures. Barnard’s close ties to the current administration in Washington are yet another example of this longer pattern, maybe even its culmination: the total capture of government interests by corporate interests.

It appears that both the Canadian and U.S. governments work for Enbridge now. That’s why this is not a tunnel story. It’s a story about power and the ruthless pursuit of profit—at the people's and the planet's expense.