Creative Commons
A scene from the refinery explosion in Superior, Wisconsin.
Superior, Wisconsin, is a small city of 27,000 people in the northwestern corner of the state. The city straddles the Minnesota border and the shore of Lake Superior and serves as the terminus for the widely opposed Enbridge Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines. It’s also been the site of several environmental disasters in recent decades.
“How can we take our lived experiences and help other people understand the trauma we went through with this refinery?”
I bought a home in Superior in 2016 and planned to spend the rest of my life there. I was living and working there in 2018 when the Husky refinery exploded, forcing everyone within a 3-mile radius and 10 miles to the south to evacuate from our homes, schools, and workplaces. Now there is a November 3 deadline to respond to a class action settlement—residents are eligible for $150 apiece and a household maximum of $300, and if we do not respond at all we lose our right to sue—although the regulatory agency responsible, the Chemical Safety Board, has yet to issue its conclusions about what happened.
In Superior, both the refinery, now owned by Cenovus, and its partner, Enbridge, are an inescapable presence. “They throw enough money around that no one wants to touch them,” says Adam Ritscher, a former Douglas County Board Supervisor. This has much more impact than the jobs, he says, because in the end they don’t employ a lot of locals.
Cenovus, for example, “rented big swaths of our dead mall as a parking lot to keep their equipment,” says Adam Ritscher, a former Douglas County board supervisor. There is no shortage of stories of every hotel room in town being rented out when work crews come through, and Enbridge’s subsidies to the local police department are now well known.
“It’s a pittance, they have really insulted my humanity,” says former Superior resident Lucas Alan Dietsche, who helped organize forums and protests following the 2018 explosion.
Shalese Snowdon (Turtle mountain band of Chippewa, Animakee Wa Zhiing #37) was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Superior at the time of the explosion and was evacuated from her dorm. In Snowdon’s view, the $150 from the lawsuit is not enough for most people to even cover the funds they spent that day to get out of the area, much less the “emotional distress or health concerns or anything else that could arise.”
Following the advice of local scientists, many residents lost crops due to toxic chemical compounds dropped in the soil from the cloud of smoke emitted by the burning refinery. More disturbingly, the negative effects from the fire may have also afflicted residents.
The settlement is offered in response to what Snowdon calls “extremely traumatic” events: We all felt the explosion, saw the smoke, and were evacuated after initially being told to go about our day as normal (some, like me, were led to believe by a confused system of communications that it was safe to return that same night before the danger of further explosions had passed).
In the weeks that followed, we were told that there was no meaningful environmental damage caused by the mass release of chemicals used to refine oil, although many of us did not believe it. We learned that the biggest danger was a hydrogen fluoride explosion, something that would have reached far outside the evacuation zone. With the settlement period closing, Cenovus announced that it plans to reopen the refinery (which has been closed since the explosion) with continued use of hydrogen fluoride despite the risks.
Because Superior has a history of environmental disasters, the city is what is referred to as a “sacrifice zone.” In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein writes, “Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.”
Snowdon feels that communities like Superior, towns that are “not affluent” and have small economies, are “preyed upon” by large corporations. “It’s the same thing they tell northern Minnesota and tribal nations: ‘Don’t worry about this right now, you need these jobs,’” she says.
The sacrifice zone model, as it is sold to the residents in a place like Superior, focuses on short-term thinking, fear of change, and dependency. Eventually, as Ritscher describes, it’s almost like the refinery is “in the town’s DNA.” Having a refinery in town is just the way things are.
It’s also psychologically overwhelming to confront the reality of these dangers. Dietsche describes looking at the refinery out the window, wondering if or when there will be another explosion. “I would look every single day, I was worried that it would go up again.”
Ritscher says people understand the refinery’s danger, but that these feelings are subverted into a form of “gallow’s humor.” He notices how his neighbors “swap horror stories almost like walking in the snow both ways.”
For residents of a “sacrifice zone,” many resist coming to the realization that they are the sacrifice.
Snowdon says that, for some Superior residents, being confronted with their victimization was eye-opening. The experience of being evacuated, the near miss with the hydrogen fluoride, and the knowledge of what toxins were dropped on the soil mobilized students to oppose other extractive projects in the surrounding area, such as the Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines, she says.
These new activists began asking themselves, “How can we take our lived experiences and help other people understand the trauma we went through with this refinery?” Snowdon says.
As the climate crisis intensifies, we don’t have to accept the short-term trade-offs that corporations like Enbridge and Cenovus offer. We can, instead, embrace—and act upon—another vision, one that places an inherent value in Superior’s location on an aquifer of artesian water, the powerful beauty of Lake Superior, or the municipal forest, rather than seeing them simply as things to exploit and be sold off.
The future is not a luxury, and we don’t have to sacrifice anyone.