Enbridge Energy says this year was not the first time some protecting coating was scraped off the exterior of Line 5.
Line 5 is the oil and gas pipeline that ships 23 million gallons of oil and gas on a route that runs beneath the Straits of Mackinac.
The company just alerted state officials that in 2014 engineers found anti-corrosion coating had rubbed off parts of the line. Ryan Duffy with Enbridge says the engineers did not think that information was important enough to share with superiors because the integrity of the line was not affected.
“This was never a safety issue – the safety of the pipeline was never compromised.”
“We’ve seen that there’s not any corrosion, not any damage to the steel. That’s all fully intact, so that’s how we can say it’s not a safety issue. But we do still take it seriously, and we have now gone in and made those coating repairs.”
Matt Goddard is with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. He says it doesn’t matter why the company got it wrong.
“We expect the information they give us to be accurate, and so if they have issues within their company then they need to address that.”
An Enbridge spokesman says the company is changing its procedures to require more information sharing.