LANSING, MI -- Fred Harrington and his grandson Riley Sargent wanted to make a statement and it needed to have some impact.

So, in the middle of a discussion about public outreach during the Monday, March 13 meeting of the Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board -- which is developing a recommendation on what action, if any, the state should take about the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac -- the two slipped into the bathroom, undressed, slathered themselves in chocolate cake batter and returned to their front row seats.

Their theatrics worked. The audience gawked. Cameras turned. Enbridge executives and spokespeople got visibly uncomfortable. Board discussion continued without missing a beat, although all eyes were on the man and boy covered in brown goo.

When the meeting turned to public comment, Harrington, a member of the Odawa tribe and former U.S. Navy submarine veteran, spoke about his fear that he and 8-year-old Riley might not be able to drink from the Great Lakes someday.

"We wanted show you what the birds will look like, what the fish will look like, what the shoreline will look like if that pipeline breaks," he said. "If we continue to let it run and run and run year after year, it will break."

His statements were followed by more than an hour of public comments from the various 260 people (not including media, board members and state staff) in attendance at the Michigan Agency for Energy offices in Lansing. The audience stretched into a side room and there were more than a dozen children playing in the hallway outside.

Inside, board co-chair Valerie Brader asked the crowd several times to stop jeering Kurt Baraniecki, Enbridge director of pipeline integrity, who was visbly nervous while trying to explain how a contractor accidentally "generalized" language in a federal work plan that showed numerous defective spots in the pipeline's protective coating. Baraniecki denied there were coating "holidays," or exposed pipe metal spots, on the line and inspections last summer only showed areas with lost outer wrap coating.

Outside, members of various Chippewa tribes from northern Michigan and Wisconsin stood in front of the building facing traffic on West Saginaw Highway with protest signs calling for a Line 5 shutdown.

Members of the Grand Traverse Bay Band of Ottawa and Chippewa arrived on a charter bus to find protesters with Food & Water Watch, the Chippewa Nation, Sierra Club, MiCats, and a group calling themselves the Great Lakes Sturgeons staging a high school pep-rally style protest, complete with papier mache shark heads, chants like "Hey, hey, ho ho, Line 5 has got to go," and a banner sign that read "Gov. Snyder - Don't "Flint" the Straits!"

Mariah Urueta, Michigan organizer with Food & Water Watch, called the demonstrations "another showing of the power and momentum that has been building up the past few years" in opposition to Line 5.

Urueta said the groups also sought to spotlight what they consider a compromised pipeline board that includes a seat for Enbridge and its customer Marathon Petroleum.

The board is awaiting the results of two state-ordered studies assessing the risk posed by the line, and alternatives to its crossing the straits bottom, which are being prepared by contractors and are expected to be released in June.

How can those study results be trusted when "Enbridge is lying about its own reports," she said.

Kate Madigan of the Michigan Environmental Council called on the state to issue an easement violation notice because of the delamination.

"The fact that the state gave Enbridge an opportunity to present and put their spin on the external corrosion without giving a similar opportunity to independent experts is an example of how the state has shown an outdated bias toward the oil industry throughout this process," she said.

Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy said afterwards the company is satisfied that Baraniecki showed there's no exposed metal on the pipeline.

As for the outer wrap delamination, Duffy said it "doesn't play a role in preventing corrosion, necessarily. It's just the outer thin wrap on the line. Bottom line: There's no exposed metal anywhere along the line. There's no holidays."

Enbridge tests show no gaps in the coating, he said.

"We are going to do this investigation and take a closer look but we do not know of any gaps in the coating right now."