North Dakota pipeline standoff ends without incident
CANNON BALL, N.D. — A standoff between Dakota Access pipeline opponents and law enforcement over a highway roadblock diminished without incident yesterday, a marked contrast to the forced removal a day earlier of protesters occupying private property.
As many as 50 protesters gathered early in the day behind heavy plywood sheets and burned-out vehicles, facing a line of concrete barriers, military vehicles and police in riot gear. But only a handful of people, some of them observers from Amnesty International, remained on the bridge by late afternoon.
Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier described the protesters as “non-confrontational but uncooperative” and credited Standing Rock Sioux tribal members for helping to ease tensions on the bridge.
Officers arrested one person yesterday, but no details were released.
Standing Rock has waged a protest for months against the four-state, 1,000-mile pipeline being developed by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners to carry North Dakota crude to a shipping point in Patoka, Ill. The protest escalated Sunday when demonstrators set up camp on private land along the pipeline’s path and more than 140 people were arrested Thursday as law enforcement, bolstered by reinforcements from several states, moved in slowly to envelop the protesters.