The Dakota Access Pipeline’s crossing of the Missouri River near the northeast corner of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation is on hold (thanks, President Obama!), but protests led by and supporting the people of Standing Rock and other American Indian tribes continue.
Tonight at 6 p.m. in Sioux Falls, opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (which runs about four miles south of Sioux Falls city limits as it skirts Hartford, Tea, and Harrisburg) will meet at Van Eps and march to Falls Park to show their solidarity with the protestors/protectors camped out at the Cannonball–Missouri confluence in North Dakota. The march starts at 6 p.m.; protestors will rally at Falls Park at 6:30.
Organizers will collect supplies for the protest camp. An update posted this morning by Julie Tibbetts says the camp has plenty of water, school supplies, toilet paper, medical supplies, and clothes but can use more tents, tent stakes, ropes, blankets, sleeping bags, socks, coats, gloves and hats, tarps, and chairs.
Among other speakers, rallygoers at Falls Park will hear from Lake County organic farmer Charlie Johnson, whose farming operation has been disrupted by Dakota Access and whose opposition to the pipeline has led Dakota Access officials to treat him with less consideration than other, more acquiescent South Dakotans along the pipeline route.
According to the most recent Dakota Access Pipeline weekly compliance report filed with the PUC, as of August 31, Dakota Access had finished laying pipe and backfilling the trench along 100% of two of three “spreads” in South Dakota and was engaged in clean-up and hydrotesting. Ditching and lowering-in/backfill remained to be done on less than 9% of the third spread. Dakota Access anticipates finishing horizontal directional drilling under the Big Sioux River this week.
What are the odds of stopping a pipeline that is so far along in the construction process? Zero
Did the state hydrologist point out the Missouri River to DAPL or did they bring in their own water witch to find it? Does the state have any inspectors checking welds and other important stuff before the pipe gets a burial?
I am betting with the tribes and counter by keeping it at 100. Obama has suited up for the game. The tacky lackey governor of North Dakota called out the national guard, the point guard, Obama, called out the DOJ. Yep, I’ll keep it at 100.
All of this keeps exposing the complete lack of a protective state government for all of it’s people. The more you know about the likes of Chris Nelson, the more you know how out of touch this state government is to protect the single most important element for a dry state like South Dakota, clean water.
Dakota Access does not have its permit to cross the Missouri River from the Army Corps of Engineers and yet they chose to lay pipe knowing that they still needed to obtain this permit. DAPL may have two sections of pipe with no way of connecting them. I stand with Jerry. This pipeline will not pass.
mike from Iowa, the South Dakota PUC did not require independent inspectors of welds. Why? I do not know.
The cost of the independent inspection may have told them the truth that the weld would fail. Can’t have that as it could cut the profits for the PUC as more and more, it sure smells like there was a payoff
Paul, I’d like to share your post about DAPL not having permits with a friend from Alaska. She has been trying to keep up with what is going on. Then she asked me what I knew about Sloan-Pick. Never heard of it.
mike from Iowa. Pick-Sloan was the act that authorized the damming (or maybe I should spell it damning) of the Missouri River. Passed to protect downstream states from flooding this act disproportionally affected Indian people who lived along the fertile bottomlands. Almost all bottomlands in South Dakota were lost to these dams.
Any shares of my posts that will help stop the DAPL tickles me.
Thanks, Paul. My friend sent me a huge article about Sloan-Pick. I have yet to read it. She also sent some pics of the Aurora which really got my attention.
I have to lean toward Ror’s opening comment: with that much steel already in the ground, Dakota Access is highly unlikely to let that investment go completely to waste. They’ll find a way across the river to connect with the pipe they’ve already laid. Maybe they’ll have to go back up to Bismarck, but they’ll get away from the reservations.
Paul, why didn’t we get more vocal opposition sooner? Why didn’t trenching across East River provoke this sort of protest, either for Dakota Access or for Keystone I?
Remember ETSI? http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=boundaries-and-water-allocation-and-use-of-shared-resource
Water is life, and it is indeed precious. Pipe in the ground is never going to go to waste. That pipe in the ground could just as well be pumping water down the line. It will come, it most certainly will come. Then what? What will be said when it is Nestle instead of Enbridge? They are kind of the same http://naturalsociety.com/nestle-ceo-water-not-human-right-should-be-privatized/
My God Cory, I just don’t know why there was not that much opposition to DAPL in South Dakota. There was some real good opposition put forth by intervenors at the PUC permit hearings on the DAPL but once the PUC issued the permit the opposition seemed to dissipate. I do not have an answer for that. What are your thoughts.
I am so damn proud of the leadership at Standing Rock, both tribal council and grassroots opposition. They have lead this fight. It is not the efforts of the Big Greens or anyone else who brought us to where we are today. It is the leadership of the Standing Rock. Our role is to support them in anyway that we can.
jerry, I really like your idea. Let’s use this pipe to ship Missouri River water instead of Bakken Crude. The Oceti Sakowin, by treaty, owns the water rights to the east bank of the Missouri River. Sounds like a good way to foster economic development in Indian country.
Paul, I can understand the dissipation of protest following PUC approval. Permit in hand, machines on site, steel in the ground, it seemed like a fait accompli here.
Even if I quibble about the relative lateness of this protest, the fact remains that the tribes have mounted a resistance movement that has at least momentarily achieved its goal: drawing the attention of the highest powers in the land and halting the project. It’s a temporary victory, and the lateness of that victory seems to make it harder to convert it to a permanent victory (harder to recruit allies among those whose land is already dug? harder for even the Obama Administration to look a corporation that has literally sunk all this money into the ground and say, “Tough noogies”?). But it is an organizing victory… one major of lesson of which, regardless of what happens in the next month or two, is that a loss before the PUC does not have to be the end of the show.
Of course, the pipelines are underscoring one major lesson for themselves, too: don’t go anywhere near the reservations. They already mapped their routes to do that; they’ll likely look for bigger buffers between them and Indians in the future.
How much is paid to the landowners for this easement Mr. Seamans? Ed indicated that the landowners were paid by DAPL and that is why they have not complained about what it is doing, I am wondering how much water is worth to them.
Holy cow—ship Missouri water? Is there a market in some of the East River towns not serviced by Lewis and Clark? Can they use this water in Iowa and Illinois? Does the Missouri have the capacity to provide that much water across such a large region? Would such water shipments be sustainable? And how do we prevent the privatization that Jerry mentions?
Governor Daugaard should jump on that option to reduce water levels in Lake Oahe and help protect Mike Rounds’s house from flooding.
We managed to say tough noogies before when it came to something that was detrimental to the citizens http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/22/business/company-news-the-saga-of-the-lonetree-landfill.html
Flint, Michigan and hundreds, if not thousands of other besieged towns and cities are all in need of clean water.
Dakota Dunes as well! Protect the bail bond dudes homey pad.
Scott Ehrisman expresses frustration that the folks who attended tonight’s rally didn’t show up last March at the Sioux Falls City Council meetings that dealt with an easement that allowed Dakota Access to build so close to Sioux Falls:
http://www.southdacola.com/blog/2016/09/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-in-sioux-falls-ignores-the-importance-of-why-local-politics-matter/
Cory, bring that point up to Mike Rounds. Let’s lower Lake Oahe water levels to save Mike’s basement.
jerry, because of a gag order imposed by TransCanada I am not allowed to discuss the financial terms of my easement. However, I can say that their offer came out to around to $8,000 per mile. That is a one time payment. There would be 6 acres in a 50 foot easement strip in one mile. So if you get $8,000 for six acres in one mile then you are getting $8,000/6 acres, or $1,777 per acre. Divide that by 100 years and you are getting about $18 per acre per year. TransCanada insults my intelligence by making me such an offer.
I would guess that amount would be more or less in line with what the DAPL paid landowners to molest their property. Pretty cheap for the risk as you note. The oil will never see domestic use either, we take all the risk and they send it to the world while laughing their arse’s off at how easy our PUC is to con. Did the leak ever get fixed with the Keystone I that happened a few months ago and did they lying liars ever get their numbers straight on how much was spilled?
jerry, the Keystone 1 leak near Freeman is supposedly fixed. However, TransCanada is required to dig up areas where they have similar welds. Why is this not in the news? Why did the PUC allow these problems to happen. Why didn’t the PUC require independent inspectors to be on the ground during construction? Why do we even have a Public Utilities Commission if it only rubber stamps what the pipeline corporations ask for?
Mr. Seamans, it all goes back to corruption. When we have a state that condones mischief like the EB5, Gear Up, and this pos case http://leestranahan.com/the-mette-scandal-summary-of-the-shocking-cover-up/ It is all about the side game and who pulls the strings and how you are then going to be paid for looking the other way. This PUC is a lottery that gets its licks by being obscure. In this Madville Times report on the PUC http://madvilletimes.com/tag/chris-nelson/, we see a little nugget from McGovern “McGovern wants to increase campaign finance transparency and prohibit contributions from regulated entities to PUC candidates. He also will fix the grain buyer bonding program to put farmers first in line when grain warehouses go bankrupt.” As far as I can see, there are no prohibitions of contributions to PUC candidates. They receive about $100,000.00 a year for a salary, so the job is a pretty lucrative one if they get it. A hundred grand is a lot, but not so much when you are rubbing elbows with those that make that in a few hours. We pay them the salary, when the average South Dakota wage is half that, so they will vote with the best intentions and interests of all the citizens of South Dakota. So, why indeed do we pay them the money they get for doing nothing in return for the work that is expected of them? If it is to hard for them to make a judgement call on safety issues like pipe welds and general concerns, they have passed their usefulness for the times. Nelson was appointed for this position by a shuffle that took away the real elected official and gave him the position, which was way weird on it’s own merits. He did not deserve it in the first place, according to voters, and does not deserve it now.
Paul Seamans, if you willindulge me for a minute, I ghot this from my friend in Alaska (she was born and raised on one of them islands with huuuuuge brown bears) and is involved in all kinds of stuff related to First Peoples.
Interesting on the no permit to go under the river dealie.
A few things I found out are that under Pick Sloan and the guise of flood relief , the fed took 200+thousand acres , 55K+ from the Standing Rock tribe alone, from tribes and built dams on their best land- fertile land. The largest land grab under plenary power BS cloak post- treaty signings.The Army Corps moved the peoples from the good land upslope and flooded the good land. Makes me madder than hell.
This was in period when the fed was pushing assimilation big time and it took forever for the tribes to get ANY of what was promised in return. Many things have yet to be settled- like final recompense, adjustment of the Corps’ so called master Plan to meet their legal obligations under law to the tribes, return any land which wasn’t used and come clean about how these folks retained the rights to water, power, and use of what was their land and the effin lake which sits on the best part of it.
Mr Obama did the right thing through the DoJ- we’ll see what comes of it.
Standing Rock tribe gets a salute from me- this has been a long drawn out war against a bunch of bureaucratic bullies for 60 plus years and asshat developers in recent years.
mike from Iowa, I have visited with people who have grown up on the Missouri River bottomlands. They would reminisce about riding horses all day and playing among the trees and their cool shade, swimming, fishing, etc.. Then Pick Sloan comes along and moves them from places like the Cheyenne Agency to places like treeless Eagle Butte SD. It makes a person sad to listen to these stories.
I stand with my Sioux and Cheyenne Brothers against this pipe line, that would destroy sacred ground and the future of our children. White Eyes has always broken TREATIES. 1880 a treaty was made Anything west of the Missouri River belong to Native American People. Sitting Bull would not sign any Treaty even if it was carved in STONE. Comanche/Wind Walker