Pipeline plot twist: where Line 5 threatens nature, now nature is a threat to Line 5

The controversial Canada-U.S. oil and gas conduit known as Line 5 could be facing its toughest challenger yet: the very watershed the pipeline's detractors are trying to protect.

The controversial Canada-U.S. oil and gas conduit known as Line 5 could be facing its toughest challenger yet: the very watershed the pipeline's detractors are trying to protect.

Spring flooding has washed away significant portions of the riverbank where Line 5 intersects Wisconsin's Bad River, a meandering, 120-kilometre course through Indigenous territory that feeds Lake Superior and a complex network of ecologically delicate wetlands.

The Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa has been in court with Alberta energy giant Enbridge Inc. since 2019 in an effort to compel the pipeline's owner and operator to reroute Line 5 around its traditional territory.

But last month, Mother Nature raised the stakes.

"There can be little doubt now that the small amount of remaining bank could be eroded and the pipeline undermined and breached in short order," the band's lawyers argued in an emergency motion filed last week.

"Very little margin for error remains."

Line 5 meets the river on Indigenous territory just past a location the court has come to know as the "meander," where the riverbed snakes back and forth multiple times, separated from itself only by several metres of forest and the pipeline itself.