Pipeline protest camp cleared, but issue lingers
CANNON BALL, N.D. • Authorities this week cleared the last holdouts from a large Dakota Access pipeline protest camp on federal land in North Dakota, but it will be a while before the region returns to normal.
There are tons of debris to be cleared. A main highway bridge remains closed. Hundreds of protesters are still in the area. The pipeline operator is rushing to complete construction and says oil could flow within 10 days. Looming over it all is a stillunresolved court battle.
“This was beautiful North Dakota prairie in a sensitive watershed area,” Gov. Doug Burgum said of the squaremile protest camp at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers. “It’s only use prior to this was for cattle grazing.”
Since August, it was home to hundreds and at times thousands of people who support the claims of Sioux nations that the US$3.8 billion pipeline to move North Dakota oil through South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois threatens drinking water, sacred sites and tribal religious practices. Texas-based pipeline developer Energy Transfer Partners disputes that.
The Army Corps of Engineers ordered the Oceti Sakowin camp closed Wednesday in advance of spring flooding. About 200 protesters left peacefully, with another 56 being arrested over two days for defying the order to leave. Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs officers at the same time cleared the much smaller Rosebud camp just to the south, on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
Many who left t hose camps planned to go to one of three nearby camps, all of which are on the reservation.
“They can get us out of Oceti, but they can’t stop what we started here,” protester Kate Silvertooth, of Loveland, Colorado, said Friday while shopping at a convenience store near the reservation town of Cannon Ball.
The status of the remaining protest camps is uncertain.
Oil could be f l owing through the pipeline as soon as March 6, according to William Scherman, an attorney for the pipeline operator.
The company has finished drilling the main hole under Lake Oahe and will soon be laying pipe under the Missouri River reservoir — the last stretch of the 1,200-mile pipeline.