MADISON (WKOW) — The Bad River Reservation and environmental advocates have challenged the state-issued permits for the Line 5 relocation project.

Representatives from Enbridge are now taking the stand to explain to the judge why the company should proceed with the relocation. 

The first witnesses were called to the stand Monday and argued that the project is environmentally safe. 

The pipeline will ship oil and natural gas through northern Wisconsin.

“Line 5 ships product from Superior, Wisconsin across northern Wisconsin through Michigan and terminates at Sarnia, Ontario,” said James Watts from Enbridge. 

Enbridge called up Tim Drake from Environmental Resources Management (ERM). He said Enbridge is modifying some of the routes to reduce the amount of environmental impact construction could have. 

“The modification of a stream restoration at a specific location where the types of restoration materials will be modified,” Drake said. “One of the crossings is an adjustment to the location of crossing just based on continued erosion.” 

Drake said Enbridge did an extensive amount of fine tuning and evaluations to make sure it uses the right methods to install the pipes. 

“There are three basic water body crossing techniques that the project will use: the open-cut crossing technique, dry crossing technique and the trenchless crossing techniques,” Drake said.

The three methods will determine whether Enbridge will have to reroute water or not when installing the pipes through a wetlands area.

Attorneys for groups suing over the project questioned why Enbridge chose one method over another. 

Drake said the process to develop the route was detailed. 

“The process that was used to evaluate, develop and assess each one of these route alternatives was a very robust project and activity including, again, evaluating existing corridors, evaluating using publicly-available data to assess potential environmental impacts to all those alternative routes,” Drake said. 

Enbridge will continue to push its case for relocating Line 5 this entire week at the Hill Farms State Office Building in Madison.