Mystery pipe intrigues NW Minnesota

There's a field east of Itasca State Park that's home to hundreds of industrial strength steel pipes. They're 30 inches wide, roughly 80 feet long and stacked up, row after row behind a chain link fence.

For anyone driving along Minnesota Highway 200 from Bemidji to Park Rapids, the piles of pipe are hard to miss. So what are they doing there?

It's a question Cal Johannsen hears a lot. He lives on the family farm near Lake George, just across Highway 200 from the pipe field. A few months ago, the field was plowed up into a series of low berms. Chain link fencing and barbed wire went up overnight.

• Sept. 2014: Enbridge delays pipeline for at least a year

Johannsen, a longtime Hubbard County commissioner, had been in meetings about the development, so he knew what was going on. But there weren't any signs, so people were confused.

"So many people were calling me or stopping into my place, I started to make a joke about it," he said. "I started telling people they were building a new Walmart."

The pipe field is not for a new Walmart. It's a staging area for an Enbridge pipeline project. The Canadian company's Sandpiper pipeline is designed to run 610 miles through Minnesota and North Dakota to transport oil.

Last month, long sections of pipe started rolling in by the semi load. The pipes look a bit like culverts, but longer and made of much thicker steel. For a while, semi trucks hauling three or four pipes were a common sight along highways 200 and 71.

The pipe is ready, but the project is not. Enbridge is still in the permitting process with the state and in September the project was delayed another year as regulators consider alternate routes for the new pipeline.

But the company ordered all its pipe more than two years ago and now has to store it somewhere. That's what ended up in the field across from Cal Johannsen's place.

Four facts about all that pipe:

• There are several pipeline staging areas along the Sandpiper's proposed route, according to Enbridge spokeswoman Lorraine Little. If that route isn't approved, or is changed, the pipes will have to be trucked a second time.

• There are 50 miles of pipe stored at the Lake George staging area, according to what Enbridge representatives told the Hubbard County board before the staging area was built.

• The tremendous size and weight of each section of pipe makes them complicated to store. Special berms of soft earth prevent the pipes from bending during storage. The rows can only be stacked four pipes high or the bottom pipes will be damaged.

• The 610 miles of pipe came from a steel company in western Canada. The whole order was made at one time and was such a big order a shuttered steel mill in Oregon was reopened. The completed pipes were shipped to Minnesota by rail and transferred to semi trucks.

The Sandpiper project has met with protests and controversy, but in the Lake George area it seems few people take issue with the stored pipe. Johannsen said he and his neighbors don't mind the pipe.

"I have coffee with most people around here," he said. "So far local people are curious, but they don't seem to mind."