Standoff at Dakota Access protest encampment tautens
CANNON BALL, N.D. — The prospect of a police raid on an encampment protesting the Dakota Access pipeline faded Wednesday, with law enforcement making no immediate move after protesters rejected their request to withdraw from private land.
Unmarked aircraft that had been monitoring protesters were withdrawn, and some activists who had been on hand for a possible confrontation headed back to a larger protest camp on federal land.
Law enforcement officials said they were ready to remove about 200 protesters who this weekend set up teepees and tents on land owned by the pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners.
Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney told reporters that authorities don’t want a confrontation but that the protesters “are not willing to bend.”
Protesters vowed to stay put.
“I’m here to die if I have to,” said Didi Banerji, who lives in Toronto but is originally from the Spirit Lake Sioux reservation in North Dakota.
Activists fear that if the nearly 1,200-mile, $3.8 billion pipeline is placed less than a mile upstream of the reservation, that could harm cultural sites and drinking water for more than 8,000 members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and millions downstream. The Standing Rock Sioux are suing federal regulators for approving the pipeline.
Protests supporting the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s opposition to the pipeline have been ongoing for months, with more than 260 people arrested so far in North Dakota. Nearly half of those arrests came over the weekend, when protesters twice blocked a state highway and law enforcement said that a drone was flown dangerously close to a police helicopter — all developments that were seen as signaling a new phase for the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
Energy Transfer Partners has said the pipeline is nearly complete other than the work in south central North Dakota.
Local sheriff’s officials had said earlier they didn’t have the resources to immediately remove activists from the private land near Cannon Ball, a town about 50 miles south of Bismarck. But officers called for reinforcements, and those were arriving from other states.