These markers can be found all along the 80-foot-wide Enbridge easement through the state. They warn would-be diggers not to dig. They tell anyone who spots a leak to call a 715 Enbridge telephone number.

The Wisconsin DNR issued a report in early 2016 that revealed Enbridge had 85 spills in Wisconsin in the previous decade. Most were rated as “very small to small” — classified as less than 2,100 gallons. Six were classified as “substantive,” up to 21,000 gallons. Five were categorized as “large” — up to 210,000 gallons.

Continent-wide, Enbridge reported a stellar accident record in 2015, delivering 2.8 billion barrels of oil and spilling a scant 15 barrels along its pipeline right-of-way or private properties.

But over the prior decade, the company averaged more than 70 spills per year. Some were barely drips. Others were huge, involving tens of thousand of gallons.

None was as bad as a 2010 spill in Michigan. It happened on the now-infamous Line 6B.

Kalamazoo River

In 2005, Enbridge identified six “crack-like” defects in Line 6B, which runs from the Chicago area south of Lake Michigan and then eastward across Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to Sarnia.

The cracks in 6B, which ranged in length from 9 inches to more than four feet, were left unrepaired. Then on July 25, 2010, alarms went off at Enbridge’s headquarters in Edmonton, Alberta, signaling something was amiss in Marshall Michigan, near the Kalamazoo River.

Enbridge employees at the controls figured whatever was wrong 1,800 miles away could be remedied by pumping more heavy crude into the line. They tried this twice for a total of about 90 minutes.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel files A July 2010 break on an Enbridge pipe in Michigan unleashed more than 1 million gallons of oil into a stream that feeds the Kalamazoo River. More than 35 miles of river were contaminated. Cleanup took years and cost more than $1 billion. The pipe has since been rebuilt at a larger capacity.

U.S. regulators later determined this was how 683,000 of the more than 1 million gallons of heavy tar sands crude were spilled. For more than 17 hours, Enbridge employees failed to understand the alarm system was working, and it was they who had become the problem.

The ensuing $1.2 billion cleanup along 35 miles of the Kalamazoo River, a tributary to Lake Michigan, eventually drew about 2,000 workers. The spill also cost the company another $177 million in a settlement it reached with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last summer.

The river has been declared restored, though traces of the tar-like crude still linger on the riverbed. So does a regional bitterness toward Enbridge, which the National Transportation Safety Board accused of suffering from a corporate “culture of deviance” that contributed to the disaster.

The transportation board chairman compared Enbridge employee actions in the first hours of the spill to the bungling “Keystone Kops” of the silent movie era.

Enbridge bosses say they now take spills as seriously as airlines take crashes.

“We are adopting the mindset of industries such as aerospace, airlines, nuclear and chemical processing, in which there is a refusal to accept that any incident is inevitable or acceptable,” Enbridge executives wrote in a Corporate Social Responsibility Report in the wake of the Kalamazoo River spill.

Despite the Michigan debacle, Enbridge maintains its historical safety record is above pipeline industry standards and boasted in its 2015 corporate performance report that over the previous 10 years the company had safely delivered 99.9995% of its products on its North American pipelines.

But this is not soap purity they are marketing, and there is another way to look at that number: During those 10 years, Enbridge spilled more than 3.5 million gallons of crude oil and other liquid industrial products.

Few doubt that Enbridge has upped its safety efforts since the 2010 disaster. But Ed Timm, a retired senior engineer and oil refinery expert who has become an outspoken critic of Enbridge’s Mackinac Straits pipeline, has one question about whether the Kalamazoo River spill truly changed company culture: Did anybody lose their job?

“I grew up in corporate America,” said Timm, who worked for Dow Chemical. “If somebody didn’t get fired in a big way, then pretty much nothing changed.”

Enbridge spokesman Ryan Duffy said the spill led to a complete rebuild of the company’s command center and additional staff. As far as anyone losing their job: “I can’t say who got fired and who didn’t.”

The paycheck of Enbridge’s CEO did not suffer the year of the spill. The board of directors gave Patrick Daniel a $2 million raise, boosting his compensation from $6 million to over $8 million.

Burrowing through the Badger State

Enbridge does not own most of the property along its pipeline route through Wisconsin.

Decades ago, its corporate predecessor acquired easements from private property owners along the route. The easements, which remain attached to titles as land changes hands, entitle Enbridge to use these properties to lay and maintain its pipelines — and to add additional lines.

In Borchardt’s case, a previous property owner sold the easement for about $2,500 in the mid 1960s, he said. When Borchardt and his wife bought their log cabin home on 10 acres outside Marshfield in 1994, and moved in with their young boys, only a single pipe existed in the easement that crosses his driveway.

He knew it was there, but said he didn’t give the pipe any more thought than he might to the sewer line running under his road.

Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel A truck on State Line Road passes by a marker for a petroleum pipeline in Walworth County on the Wisconsin-Illinois border. Enbridge has four pipelines carrying petroleum products across the length of Wisconsin from Superior to the Illinois border.

“It was just a little pipeline,” he said.

Borchardt became more aware of the easement when construction crews arrived in the late 1990s to add a parallel pipeline, 24 inches in diameter, that can carry more than 300,000 barrels of crude per day.

Less than a decade after this pipeline was completed, crews came back with plans for a 42-inch pipe that dwarfed the collective capacity of the two existing lines. This line was primarily built to carry Canadian tar sands oil, called bitumen, a heavy crude so dense it sits in the ground hard as a hockey puck.

To make the oil liquid enough to flow in a pipe, chemicals must be added. Those chemicals, called diluent, are then pulled from the 42-inch pipeline at its end point in Illinois and sent back north in the smaller pipe so they can be reused.

This meant that the 42-inch pipeline project was actually a two-pipeline project — the big pipe to get oil to refineries, and a smaller pipe running parallel but flowing in the opposite direction.

Retired physician Bill Manor has no pipes within the sliver of easement that runs across his property outside Marshfield, but Enbridge considered his land crucial to the construction project so it could get crews and equipment to the pipeline route on a neighbor’s property.

Manor remembers being asked by a man representing the construction company to sign an agreement granting that access. Knowing that some of his neighbors opposed the additional lines, he declined.

Then, he said, he got a letter threatening a lawsuit.

Eventually, once the neighbors’ concerns were addressed, Manor said he agreed to let the crews use his land, with some resentment for what he saw as heavy-handed dealing. Feelings in the neighborhood only further soured — and spread throughout Wisconsin — as pipeline construction progressed in 2007 and 2008.

State regulators determined in their pre-construction environmental review that the project would have “no significant impact” on the environment, though the pipes would cross under more than 200 rivers and streambeds, burrow beneath hundreds of wetlands and slash through 115 miles of forest, requiring the clear cut of nearly 2,000 acres.

Regulators had a starkly different assessment after the work was done. Pipeline crews were cited for more than 100 environmental violations after tearing up wetlands and streams and defiling other sensitive areas, including rupturing an existing pipe that spilled 200,000 gallons of crude in Rusk County.

The DNR turned its case of construction violations over to the state Department of Justice, which fined the company $1.1 million for the sloppy work.

Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Kayakers prepare for a trip downstream on the Namekagon River between Hayward and Trego, Wis. The Enbridge pipeline system runs underneath this river which is part of the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, along with hundreds of other rivers, streams and wetlands in Wisconsin.

It was a huge fine in the annals of Wisconsin’s environmental enforcement, but not a lot of money for Enbridge. Even at oil’s currently depressed prices, the new line is being upgraded to carry $60 million worth of oil — per day.

After all the dust settled and mud congealed following the pipeline’s initial construction, Borchardt replanted the land astride his driveway with native grasses and flowers. His refurbished prairie — which had been a trench worthy of World War I’s Western Front — eventually greened up and was thriving again.

Then another survey crew knocked on his door.

Twisting the spigot

The days of Enbridge expanding its oil pipeline capacity through Wisconsin with relatively little controversy could be coming to an end.

When the company built its newest pipeline, the DNR reported that it would have a capacity of “approximately” 400,000 barrels per day.

And when it opened in 2009, it did.

Then in 2015, Enbridge doubled the line’s capacity to 800,000 barrels and now, with additional pump station power coming online in the next few months, Enbridge will be able to push 1.2 million barrels per day through the pipe.

Pipelines are primarily regulated by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Adding all this capacity did not require a presidential permit, as did the similarly sized Keystone XL, because this Enbridge pipe does not cross the U.S.-Canadian border.

Enbridge also had little problem passing Wisconsin state regulatory hurdles, which focus on how the pipeline construction could harm waters and wildlife habitat.

Yet the expansion has recently drawn controversy in Dane County, where local leaders are wary of a spill similar to the 2010 Kalamazoo River disaster.

As part of its permit to allow Enbridge to build a pump station to expand the line’s capacity, the Dane County Zoning and Land Regulation Committee required the company to acquire a $25 million insurance policy to specifically cover spill cleanups.

The requirement was dropped after the Republican-controlled Legislature quietly inserted language into the state budget that stripped counties’ ability to demand such insurance. Dane County Supervisor Patrick Miles, a Democrat, called the move “an act of political cowardice.”

Republican leaders in the Assembly and Senate did not respond to requests for comment.

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From W.W. Norton & Co. The Great Lakes hold 20% of the world’s freshwater, and they provide food, work and weekend fun for tens of millions of Americans. Yet they are under threat as never before.

In a work of narrative reporting in the vein of Rachel Carson and Elizabeth Kolbert, prize-winning reporter Dan Egan delivers an eye-opening portrait of our nation’s greatest natural resource as it faces ecological calamity. He tells the story of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Chicago ship canal — good ideas in their time that have had horrendous consequences. He explains how invasive species such as Asian carp, sea lamprey, and zebra mussels have decimated native species and endanger the entire United States. And he examines new risks, such as unsafe drinking water, the threat of water diversions, and “dead zones” that cover hundreds of square miles of water—while showing how the Great Lakes can be restored and preserved for generations to come.

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Enbridge has argued it has an approximately $900 million liability policy that provides adequate insurance. Dane County’s concern was that this type of insurance coverage might not necessarily cover accidental spills.

Enbridge did not have insurance to completely cover the Kalamazoo River disaster, and also ended up in a protracted fight with an insurer over whether its policy covered the spill. But in the end, the company used a combination of insurance money and its own cash to pay for the $1.2 billion cleanup.

“In the event of a release we are committed to doing what’s right: We’ll respond. We’ll clean up. We’ll bear all the costs,” Mark Maki, president of Enbridge Energy Partners, wrote in a 2015 opinion column published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Stripping Dane County’s ability to require additional insurance was not the only favor the Legislature did for Enbridge.

In 2014, another Enbridge-hired work crew arrived at the door of Borchardt’s Marshfield home and informed him they needed to take a new survey of his 10-acre property. The reason, he was told, is that Enbridge is considering adding a new Wisconsin oil pipeline.

Enbridge has acknowledged in corporate documents that it is eyeing a twin to the existing 42-inch line. The company isn’t talking about how much oil it would send down that line. If it is indeed a twin, its sibling soon will be capable of carrying 1.2 million barrels per day.

To build that pipe, Enbridge would need to expand the width of its easement that runs the length of Wisconsin.

“That 80 feet is full,” explained Paul Meneghini, a senior manager for Enbridge in Superior. “We’d definitely need to purchase additional easement.”

Meneghini said any new pipeline plans are speculative at this point and that the company has no contract with oil producers to carry additional crude.

Yet to prepare the way, Enbridge successfully lobbied the Legislature in 2015 to adjust a state law so private land along the easement can be more easily condemned, a move that could open the door to expanding the easement’s width through the state — with or without adjacent property owners’ consent.

Borchardt said the 2014 survey crew was coy about how much additional land the company was eyeing, but the swath they surveyed ran more than 100 feet from the edge of the existing easement to within several feet of his doorstep.

Enbridge executives say rumors of the easement growing by 200 or even 300 feet in width are unfounded. When asked for a specific number of feet the company would need to add a twin to the existing 42-inch pipeline, Meneghini said: “50…ish.”

Borchardt said he had no sound legal argument against the previous pipeline construction projects; he knew the terms of the easement that came with the purchase of his land.

This, he said, is different. This time he has no plans to let Enbridge expand in a manner he fears could level his chicken coop, destroy his orchard and perhaps force him from his home — at least not without a fight.

When he called the offices of the Public Service Commission to express his concerns about the easement expansion, he said, a staffer informed him he has an obligation to accommodate a new line because it carries a product so important to so many.

He felt that he was accused of having a selfish not-in-my-backyard mentality to resist further construction of essential infrastructure.

“You can’t call me a NIMBY,” Borchardt said, noting the volume of oil already crossing his property.

“I’m doing my part. We are already assuming a vast risk.”

Resistance growing

Borchardt has helped organize an “80 Feet Is Enough” property owners group to try to block any expansion, or at least put landowners in a better position to bargain if they are forced to sell easements — and perhaps their homes — to Enbridge.

Enbridge has its own public relations efforts underway in Wisconsin to demonstrate its good corporate citizenship. By the time surveys for the additional easement wrapped up in 2015, the company that year had donated several pickup trucks to fire departments in communities along the easement route. The company spent nearly $300,000 on its community investment program for that year.

Enbridge also has been out and about touting its economic impact on the state, in which it pays over $28 million in property taxes. The company reported a full-time and temporary workforce in Wisconsin of 430 employees in 2015, with a payroll of just over $27 million.

Those numbers do little to assuage retired physician Manor, who had been threatened with a lawsuit over his refusal to let Enbridge work crews on his property. He sees getting Canada’s dirty and hard-to-process oil to market as a Canadian problem.

“This is toxic, terrible stuff that should stay in the ground,” he said. “If Canada wants to market this to the world, then it should create a pipeline within the borders of Canada.”

Not everyone along the pipeline easement in Wisconsin views Enbridge as a bad neighbor, or the pipelines as a negative.

Standing on the bleachers on a Tuesday afternoon in October, watching his high school football team practice on a field above Enbridge’s oil lines, Owen-Withee school district administrator Bob Houts said Enbridge has been an excellent partner. He joked that if the new pipeline and easement expansion goes through, his district might be able to afford a new playing surface for its football field.

He said he never thinks about all the oil already coursing under district property.

Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The Owen-Withee Blackhawks prepare for their final regular season game last October on their practice field that sits atop the Enbridge pipeline system in central Wisconsin. Owen-Withee school district Administrator Bob Houts said the company has been an excellent partner.

“If it’s not bubbling up out of the ground, and if we don’t smell it, then we don’t notice it,” he said. “It is what it is.”

What frustrates Borchardt is the idea that the ever-expanding pipeline capacity, and the inherent risk it carries, is happening because of decisions being made in places as far away as Alberta and Washington, D.C.

“It’s a massive conveyor system,” Borchardt said of the oil lines coming into — and out of — Superior. “And if any one part changes upstream, something downstream has to change.”

One such upstream change could bring through Wisconsin the oil that now flows through the twin pipes on the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac — pipes that Michigan regulators, politicians and environmentalists are growing increasingly wary of allowing to operate.

Those pipes happen to be among the oldest in the Enbridge network.

Dan Egan is a reporter covering the Great Lakes. His reporting on invasive species and other issues has won numerous awards. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for explanatory reporting, in 2010 and 2013.