TransCanada has applied for new permits from the Army Corps of Engineers and state agencies to build its proposed Keystone XL pipeline across over 1,000 U.S. waterways, including the Missouri, Niobrara, and Keya Paha rivers in Nebraska. [1]
The pipeline would imperil the drinking water of Tribal, rural, and urban communities — including the city of Omaha — that rely on the Missouri River, as well as the precious Ogallala aquifer, which provides water that irrigates one-third of our nation’s crops.
This move by TransCanada to apply for new permits comes after indigenous, landowner, and environmental groups including Bold successfully sued to stop the company’s illegal use of a blanket “Nationwide Permit 12” to fast-track authorization of Keystone XL construction through all 1,000+ water crossings. [2]
The Army Corps and state agencies are now accepting public comments on TransCanada’s new water permit application until Sept. 13, 2020. (Public hearings are also expected to be scheduled in late September or October, details to come). [3]
I traveled to Billings, Montana today to stand in solidarity with landowners, Tribal Nations, and Water Protectors at a rally before the one and only public hearing being held by the U.S. State Department on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
Unfortunately, unlike the historic 2013 State Dept. hearing on KXL in Grand Island, Nebraska — where over 1,000 Pipeline Fighters turned out, and hundreds gave public testimony in front of their fellow neighbors and citizens for nearly 12 hours — the scene here in Montana is a sad excuse for a public hearing, where citizens must instead speak their concerns privately one-by-one into a tape recorder, or else write them out to submit on paper.
Despite this attempt to silence the voices of Pipeline Fighters with no true “public hearing,” it’s still crucial that we speak out.
The best way you can make your voice heard right now is to submit a written comment into the State Department’s new draft environmental review of the pipeline. Public comments are due by Nov. 18th.
(Note: We encourage affected landowners living on the proposed KXL route to submit hand-written letters with your public comments on the pipeline directly to the State Department. Include docket number: DOS-2019-0033)
Mailing address: Ross Alliston, Keystone XL Program Manager
Office of Environmental Quality and Transboundary Issues
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
I’m proud to stand alongside Water Protectors here in Montana today, and will make sure to relay all the concerns of landowners and Pipeline Fighters from back home in Nebraska when I speak directly to State Department officials at the hearing.
You may have already heard, but TransCanada just filed new eminent domain claims in court against 90 Nebraska family farmers and ranchers — including my family — who refuse to give up our land for this foreign corporation’s Keystone XL tarsands export pipeline. [1]
TransCanada has been bullying my family and other Nebraska landowners for the past ten years, seeking land that’s been in our families for generations for a pipeline that threatens our farms, our water, and our climate. Now this foreign corporation has filed a lawsuit against my family, and dozens of other farming and ranching families, and intends to abuse eminent domain to take our land for KXL against our wishes.
We have less than a month from today to respond in court, and oppose TransCanada’s eminent domain lawsuits. We need your support in this moment more than ever before.
TransCanada is attempting to make some waves and put up a smokescreen to make investors think KXL is a “green-light,” when there remain serious obstacles in this pipeline’s path. The company has said it plans to engage in “pre-construction” activities along the proposed route for KXL, like clearing trees.
Landowners like my family have stood together for ten years, and we intend to fight these new eminent domain lawsuits. Bold supporters like you have also stood with the landowners during this decade-long fight, and we thank you.
A solemn message to the residents of Hoyt Lakes, Aurora, Meadowlands, Floodwood, Brookston, Cloquet, Scanlon, Carlton, Thomson, Wrenshall, Duluth, Superior WI, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Canada and most of all, Lake Superior, please seriously heed the warnings in the message below.
Even state-of-the-art mine tailings ponds that use earthen dam walls (especially if they are intended to grow to become 250 feet tall like PolyMet’s!!) are subject to sudden, unexpected – and very catastrophic – breaches that could easily destroy for a generation every living thing in the watershed downstream. Even tributaries can be contaminated and even destroyed in the sudden deluge that can reverse the flow of the creeks temporarily.
And be warned that foreign multinational mining corporations – just like every other profit-minded, multinational corporation that anybody can think of – has their profits as their number one goal; the long-term adverse environmental effects from their mining operations be damned!
Foreign multinational mining corporations have poisoned the environment – sometimes gradually, sometimes catastrophically – wherever on the planet they have extracted their minerals – NO EXCEPTIONS.
The giant multinational mining corporations Vale, BHP Billiton and Samarco (that have extensive operations in Brazil) have again demonstrated to the world why they can’t be trusted, for just yesterday (January 25, 2019) they have perpetrated another environmental catastrophe.
Read on and understand that similar disasters could (and probably will) happen downstream from the PolyMet/NorthMet/Glencore sulfuric acid-producing copper mine whose tailings pond dam is scheduled to rise to an eventually unstable height of 250 feet !!
Far more communities than the dozen towns named above could be devastated irreparably, despite what the starry-eyed and bamboozled (and/or paid off by political contributions) politicians like Senator Klobuchar, Senator Smith, US House member Stauber, ex-US House member Nolan, and practically every politician from either major political party that one can think of. The high potential for sudden environmental disasters similar to Samarco, Mount Polley (British Columbia) and now Brumadinho, Brazil (plus a hundred others since global mineral extractions by huge corporations began).
New analysis reveals that we have much less water in our aquifers than we previously thought — and the oil and gas industry could put that at even greater risk.
We’re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That’s probably not news to everyone, but new research suggests that, deep underground in a number of key aquifers in some parts of the United States, we may have much less water than previously thought.
“We found that the average depth of water resources across the country was about half of what people had previously estimated,” says Jennifer McIntosh, a distinguished scholar and professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.
McIntosh and her colleagues — who published a new study about these aquifers in November in Environmental Research Letters — took a different approach to assessing groundwater than other research, which has used satellites to measure changes in groundwater storage. For example, a 2015 study looked at 37 major aquifers across the world and found some were being depleted faster than they were being replenished, including in California’s agriculturally intensive Central Valley.
McIntosh says those previous studies revealed a lot about how we’re depleting water resources from the top down through extraction, such as pumping for agriculture and water supplies, especially in places like California.
But McIntosh and three other researchers wanted to look at groundwater from a different perspective: They examined how we’re using water resources from the bottom up. More
“The closer a company injects fracking wastewater (and all the salts and pollutants that may come with it) to aquifers supplying freshwater for drinking and agriculture, the more likely those aquifers will be contaminated. In the recent University of Texas paper, researchers call out this increased likelihood in the country’s highest producing shale play, the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico.”
The first known oil well in Oklahoma happened by accident. It was 1859 and Lewis Ross was actually drilling for saltwater(brine), not oil. Brine was highly valued at the time for the salt that could be used to preserve meat. As Ross drilled deeper for brine, he hit oil. And people have been drilling for oil in Oklahoma ever since.
Lewis Ross might find today’s drilling landscape in the Sooner State somewhat ironic. The oil and gas industry, which has surging production due to horizontal drilling and fracking, is pumping out huge volumes of oil but even more brine. So much brine, in fact, that the fracking industry needs a way to dispose of the brine, or “produced water,” that comes out of oil and gas wells because it isn’t suitable for curing meats. In addition to salts, these wastewaters can contain naturally occurring radioactive elements and heavy metals.
But the industry’s preferred approaches for disposing of fracking wastewater — pumping it underground in either deep or shallow injection wells for long-term storage — both come with serious risks for nearby communities.
In Oklahoma, drillers primarily use deep injection wells for storing their wastewater from fracked shale wells, and while the state was producing the same amount of oil in 1985 as in 2015, something else has changed. The rise of the fracking industry in the central U.S. has coincided with a rise in earthquake activity.
From 1975 to 2008, Oklahoma averaged from one to three earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater a year. But by 2014, the state averaged 1.6 of these earthquakes a day. It now has a website that tracks them in real time.
“Working mostly with data from Facebook and other social media sites, they are able to determine what people want to hear and how they want to hear it. Cambridge Analytica based much of its model on research done by Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre which earlier published an online personality quiz that went viral. In the UK there are ethical guidelines about how such data can be used and according to Professor Johathan Rush, the Centre’s director, as quoted in the Guardian article:
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.”
The Precautionary Principle: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage to environmental or human health, exploitation by any corporate or personal entity that could damage the environment or the health of humans must be delayed until there is absolute scientific certainty that damage can be totally averted.”
“The point, ladies and gentleman, is that greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.” – Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) from the movie Wall Street
“The economic system in the USA is not capitalism. Rather, it is corporate fascism, individualism and money worship, not capitalism.” – Anonymous
”Environment Canada reported that the metallic contaminants that had been dumped in the tailings pond included these hazardous metals:Lead, Arsenic, Nickel, Zinc, Cadmium, Vanadium, Antimony, Manganese and Mercury.” (Note that Mount Polley was a copper mine whose massive tailings lagoon earthen dam [130 feet tall] dissolved in 2014, suddenly releasing 24,000,000 million cubic meters of toxic sludge into the tiny Hazeltine Creek, the nearby Lake Polley and then into the pristine Quesnel Lake, which flowed into the 600 mile long Fraser River, a migratory Sockeye salmon-bearing river that empties into the Georgia Strait and the Pacific Ocean at the city of Vancouver, B.C. The dam wall breech resulted in the worst environmental disaster in the history of British Colombia)
Last night in Duluth, Minnesota (10-22-2018) a small, Minnesota-based, right-wing, Libertarian think tank, the Center of the American Experiment (CAE), came to town to do a one-sided, propagandistic, fact-free promotion supporting the foreign penny stock mining company, PolyMet and its plans to dig an experimental, inherently dangerous, highly toxic, open pit copper/nickel sulfide mine in water-rich northern Minnesota near the headwaters of the St Louis River.
What was likely not discussed at the pro-corporate presentation (to which nobody opposing copper-nickel mining was invited) was the fact that PolyMet’s massive open pit mine has to have an even more massive, highly toxic waste/tailings lagoon nearby that would eventually store, behind 250 foot high (!) earthen dam (!) walls, billions of gallons (!) of eternally-poisonous, highly acidic (sulfuric acid with a pH of stomach acid) mine sludge for generations or centuries (absent, of course a locally heavy rain deluge that could easily cause a sudden, unexpected breech in the earthen dam walls, resulting in what could potentially be the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of Minnesota).
Federal agencies don’t keep most of their records forever. At some point, they’re legally allowed to destroy the majority of them.
But when? And which records? That’s up to the agency and the National Archives (with some input from the public, at least in theory).
In an overlooked process that’s been going on for decades, agencies create a “Request for Records Disposition Authority” that gives details about the documents, then proposes when they can be destroyed (e.g., three years after the end of the fiscal year, 50 years after they’re no longer needed, etc.). Occasionally, agencies propose keeping some documents permanently, which means eventually transferring them to the National Archives.
The National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) then “appraises” the agency’s Request for Records Disposition Authority, almost always giving the greenlight.
Around this point, the agency’s request and NARA’s appraisal are announced in the Federal Register. They are not published in the Register, nor are they posted to the Register website (including Regulations.gov). Their existence is simply noted.
Dept. of the Interior is asking for permission to destroy records about oil and gas leases, mining, dams, wells, timber sales, marine conservation, fishing, endangered species, non-endangered species, critical habitats, land acquisition, wild horses & burros and lots more. It’s also wanting to permanently retain a smaller subset of documents in each category, which will be transferred to the National Archives, where they will become harder to access via FOIA.
This is crucial stuff. In the months, years, and decades ahead, if you get “records destroyed” responses, or a vague “no records” response, from NPS, BLM, FWS, BIA, etc., this could be the root cause.
Comment period has been extended to Nov. 23, 2018 READ MORE HERE↓
While we are continuing to challenge the Trump administration’s rubber-stamp approval of the federal permit for Keystone XL in the courts, Trump’s State Department recently opened a public comments docket for an “Environmental Assessment” of the new Mainline Alternative route for KXL in Nebraska.
This new route includes land in Nebraska counties that has never before undergone environmental review, and where landowners never knew until now — after all the years of public hearings and submitting comments — that KXL might be plowing through their farms, and had no due process and chance to make their voices heard.
Basically, there’s a huge list of problems with this illegal review. It’s an attempt to shoe-horn a review of private property in Nebraska by a federal agency with no authority over that land, into an illegally outdated environmental review of KXL from 2014, in clear violation of the bedrock National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
But we still need to make our voices heard. Despite this illegal sham review process that’s been set in motion — which we will continue to fight in the courts — it’s critical that Nebraskans especially, but all Pipeline Fighters sign on and tell the Trump administration they are opposed to Keystone XL.
We’ve composed a sample comment you can sign-on to, that covers all the bases on protesting this illegal process with the same arguments our attorneys are using in court, and includes key issues of concern for Nebraska’s land, water and property rights, and sovereign rights of Indigenous nations. You may also edit the language, or add your own personal statement to the comment.
*Important: If you are a landowner on the new “Mainline Alternative” route, please contact mark@boldnebraska.org for assistance with submitting your comment. For instance, if you have water crossings, or known endangered species or wildlife habitat on your land, be sure to include exact locations and detailed information about them in your comments.
The deadline to submit a public comment is June 25th.
An Open Letter to the Affected Mayors, City Councilors and Assorted Thought Leaders who Inhabit the Areas Downstream and Downwind
The first (of many) junior mining companies that want to mine copper in northeast Minnesota’s water-rich, relatively unspoiled forest and lakes region is the PolyMet Mining Corporation that is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
PolyMet is a Canadian Penny Stock mining company that you can buy on the NYSE for 81 cents a share. It’s peak share price over the past 12 months was $1.36 a share, but it isn’t on anybody “buy” list at the moment.
PolyMet has never mined anything in its life and has never earned a single penny producing anything of value. It is a front group for Glencore, a multinational mining, commodities and oil and gas trading company that is based in Switzerland. Both corporations prefer doing business hidden behind boardroom walls. PolyMet’s daily operations are mostly funded by greedy institutional investors and loans from the deep-pocketed Glencore. Neither corporation should have any credibility in the minds of right-thinking individuals. I will explain that statement later in the column.
In January 2011, Glencore and PolyMet, signed a secret agreement that guaranteed that Glencore could buy controlling interest in PolyMet with the right to convert it’s debt into equity. It is public knowledge that Glencore also has the rights to sell all the metal that is mined in the first 5 years of production in the world’s markets.
Contrary to PolyMet’s talking points about being good citizens by producing copper for all of our needs, none of the copper that is mined by PolyMet might ever be utilized here at home.More
Colorado River Drinking Water Source for 40 Million
2018: 831 Active Uranium Mining Claims Near Grand Canyon
2011: Before Ban, 3,500 Claims
WASHINGTON – If the Supreme Court lifts the moratorium on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, the expected surge in active claims would endanger not only a cherished national landmark, but also the drinking water for 40 million Americans, according to the Environmental Working Group and Earthworks.
Between the current leanings of the Supreme Court and the Trump administration being in power, the mining industry clearly sees an opportunity to open up uranium extraction along the canyon rim for the first time in a decade. There are currently fewer than 900 active uranium claims near the canyon, compared to almost 3,500 before the ban.
Last week two mining industry lobbying groups petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the 20-year moratorium for uranium mining on more than 1 million acres of land along the canyon rim, put in place in 2012 by then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. The mining groups are seeking reversal of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ December ruling to leave the ban in place.
“If the Supreme Court decides in favor of the uranium industry, it could permanently scar a sacred landscape that is the jewel in the crown of America’s natural heritage, and threaten the drinking water of 40 million Americans from Los Angeles to Las Vegas,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “President Trump has shown total disregard for preserving natural resources and protecting public health, and if the court overturns the ban, the Grand Canyon could soon fall victim to his radical agenda.” More
“Industry-controlled ‘science’ is not really science but a smokescreen to pave the way for products that may be harmful – but what do they care as long as they profit? There are many great scientists but there are also some who are willing to be hired to ‘prove’ that something doesn’t cause cancer, or that something is ‘safe’. You cannot trust the EPA, the FDA, or industry ‘science’.”
Here is an incomplete list of some of the culprits:
A) Foreign Mining Corporations (PolyMet, Glencore, Twin Metals, Antofagasta, etc);
Minnesota’s Elected Politicians/Accomplices (both Corporate-influenced “Liberal” Democrats, and “Conservative” Republicans);
Minnesota’s “Regulatory” Agencies that are Supposed to be “Natural Resource Protectors” (Including the DNR, the PCA, and the US Forest Service); and
Most Area Newspapers; Most Area Television Stations; All the Area’s Chambers of Commerce; Minnesota Power (Electric Utility); the Trump Administration; Regional Labor Unions: and Dozens of Suppliers/Businesses that will Temporarily Profit from Supplying the Mining Industry While Simultaneously Risking the Permanent Poisoning of the St Louis River Watershed, Including Lake Superior
This column will point out and try to de-mystify some of the often-perplexing developments in the decades-long debate concerning allowing foreign mining corporations (which could justifiably be considered “Undocumented Aliens”) to invade water-rich northern Minnesota in order to extract our state’s non-ferrous metal deposits- for the selfish enrichment of its foreign shareholders and management, none of whom really care about the long-term consequences to the state’s precious water resources.
Everywhere in the world where copper mines have been dug and the poisonous tailing’s ponds have been installed, there has not been a single one that has not permanently polluted the ground water and the downstream watersheds, often catastrophically, see the list of 100 of them at . State of the art copper sulfide mines inevitably produce as an inevitable by-product sulfuric acid and many other toxic substances that poison the soil, air, ground water, nearby aquifers, lakes and downstream rivers, especially in water-rich environments like northern Minnesota. More
Years of research have revealed that the purpose of ongoing international geoengineering operations is to control the weather to create droughts and artificial scarcity of water and food (planned “problem”). From the resulting global crisis, chaos and fear (planned “reaction”) of people not having adequate water and food due to “climate change,” a totalitarian world government (planned “solution”) will be perpetrated under the veil of “sustainable development” (See United Nations’ Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development). Speaking of year 2030:
According to UN-endorsed projections, global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40% in 2030, thanks to a combination of climate change, human action and population growth.
The secondary purpose of chemtrails is to make the population sick by causing individuals to ingesting toxins such as aluminum and possibly viruses.
The Geoengineered Cape Town Drought
The Geoengineered Cape Town Drought is a test-run, a preview of what the rest of us can expect in the coming years.
Day Zero is looming for Cape Town. According to the latest estimates May 11th is when the city’s water supply will be turned off, leaving four million residents to line up for water rations at one of 200 points across the city.
Cape Town is in the middle of an unprecedented drought and rainfall has been far below expected levels for the past three years. Residents are being asked to limit use to 50 liters a day (13.2 gallons), which is less than a third of the average daily water use in Britain.
Our air is acrid and dry and my crops have failed. My animals are on their last legs. We are being forced to take out loans via the Landbank, thus enslaving us and also forcing us to buy GMO seeds. The North West has been declared a Disaster Area.
Without any mention of geoengineering, National Geographic states that “climate change” may have exacerbated Cape Town’s drought and warns that much of the world is at risk of a similar situation. Mexico City, Melbourne, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, and California are listed as potential water shortage victims of “climate change.”
The main significance of Black Snake* Killaz is the continuous historical record it provides of the 2016 Standing Rock occupation and blockade of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The occupation drew participation from indigenous supporters all over the world, as well as environmental activists and veterans. It also inspired dozens of support protests in cities around the US.
By engaging in continuous direct action, either placing their bodies in the path of construction equipment, vandalizing it or locking themselves down to it, the Water Protectors succeeded in bring pipeline construction to a total halt.
The Full Scale Military Campaign Launched Against Standing Rock
We need to find a fix for the unhealthy populations of non-native, domestic cattle and sheep on public lands.
Imagine a proposal to introduce privately owned livestock onto the public lands of the American West. The owners of the privately owned livestock would successfully gain use of 229 million acres of public lands in the West. The livestock would be owned by a politically powerful industry that attracted a passionate following — people who love using public lands for their private profit so much that they influence the federal management of their privately owned animals so that they would rarely, if ever, be restricted by law. Some of them would be so passionate that they would take over and occupy government buildings for 41 days, and end up costing taxpayers at least $9 million, including $2.3 million on federal law enforcement and $1.7 million to replace damaged or stolen property.
The downside of these privately owned livestock would be that they destroy native vegetation, damage soils and stream banks, and contaminate waterways with fecal waste. After decades of livestock grazing, once-lush streams and riparian forests have been reduced to flat, dry wastelands; once-rich topsoil has been turned to dust, causing soil erosion, stream sedimentation and wholesale elimination of some aquatic habitats; overgrazing of native fire-carrying grasses has starved some western forests of fire, making them overly dense and prone to unnaturally severe fires. Not to mention that predators like the grizzly and Mexican gray wolf were driven extinct in southwestern ecosystems by “predator control” programs designed to protect the livestock industry. More
“Every stream on public lands grazed by livestock is polluted and shows a huge surge in E. coli bacterial contamination during the grazing season,” says Marvel. “No wonder we can’t drink the water.”
Marvel, who retired from WWP last year, spent two decades haranguing and suing the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the government bodies that are supposed to regulate ranching on the public domain. “Forest Service and BLM staffers see their job as the protection and enabling of ranchers. They are the epitome of what is meant by agency capture.”
Here are my reasons that the DNR should reject PolyMet’s permit applications for their earthen tailings dam, their liquid slurry pipeline pumping operation and their open pit sulfide mine near the headwaters of the St Louis River:
For starters, it is critically important to understand that the foreign Penny Stock company called PolyMet has a current share price of $0.63 per share, down from $1.50 per share in 2014. PolyMet, a total amateur in the business, has never operated a single mine in its short corporate life nor has it earned a single penny from mining. Their only income comes from selling shares to speculators and borrowing money from investors to pay their executives and employees. In addition, PolyMet, being an inanimate money-making corporation (that by definition has no conscience), cannot be trusted to tell the public about all the risks to the environment (including wildlife, fish, water, soil and air) that their exploitation of the earth could generate.
Therefore PolyMet can be expected to hide the fact that their operations could easily cause a massive environmental catastrophe similar to what happened at Mount Polley, British Columbia in 2014 (carefully study the article further below for the frightening details). Mount Polley was a state of the art copper mining operation.
Every citizen stakeholder that is potentially adversely affected by PolyMet’s operatioin deserves to be fully informed by (theoretically) unbiased regulators such as the MN DNR about the potentially catastrophic risk to the water users who happen to live downstream from the massive tailings lagoon, whose (eventual) 250 foot high earthen dam is at a high risk of failing in some way or other sometime in the future, especially in the event of a large deluge of rain, an earthquake or a design flaw that could cause the earthen dam to dissolve, leak, over-top or structurally fail in some other way, including being damaged by sabotage. The risks will exist for eternity, since the toxic metals (see list below) in the lagoon will never degrade into non-toxic forms.
In addition, the vulnerable pipeline that will carry the toxic sludge from the processing plant to the slurry pond is at high risk of sabotage, with serious environmental contamination that could possibly be even worse than the bursting of a dirty frack oil pipeline such as could happen from the foreign pipeline company Enbridge as it transports dirty oil from the tar sands in Canada or from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. I don’t believe that PolyMet has dealt with the possibility of sabotage.
Up to this point, both PolyMet and Twin Metals (and all of the governmental agencies that have been involved in the approval process) have been seriously neglectful in educating the public about all the potential lethal dangers of either the pipeline or the massive amount of toxic liquids that will forever cause the deaths of any water bird that lands on the lake-like lagoon (a la Butte, Montana’s ever-lastingly poisonous mining tailings “pond” and the nearby defunct Berkeley open pit mine [now a toxic “lake”] that has had its water pumps shut down and is now nearly filled to the brim with poisonous water that has high levels of dissolved toxic metals and a pH approximating that of stomach acid!). More
Sulfide mining produces toxic waste that could irreversibly damage Minnesota’s fragile lakes, rivers and natural resources.
This is not our grandparents’ iron mining — sulfide mining has never been done in Minnesota. While iron mines have significant environmental challenges of their own, the sulfuric acid that is produced with sulfide mining makes it particularly difficult to avoid polluting nearby lakes, streams and ground water.
When water and air mix with the waste from iron mining, rust is produced. But when the same process happens with sulfide mining, sulfuric acid is created. When this acid dissolves rock and leaches out toxic heavy metals, the substance is commonly called “Acid Mine Drainage.”
When water and air mix with iron mining waste, you get rust. With sulfide mining, sulfuric acid is produced.
Acid Mine Drainage has devastated water bodies in many states where this type of mining has occurred. It kills fish, wildlife and plants, leaving lakes, rivers and streams devoid of most living creatures.
Humans Mining by-products such as arsenic, manganese and thallium, have been shown in high levels to increase the risk of cancer and other illnesses in humans. Because mining takes place below the water table, it’s easy for contamination to leach out of the mine into groundwater, threatening drinking water supplies and health. More about risks to human health…More
After heeding our calls to provide more opportunities for the public to make our concerns heard about the Keystone XL tarsands export pipeline, the Nebraska Public Service Commission will hold a second “public meeting” tomorrow — Wednesday, June 7th (12:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.) in O’Neill, Nebraska. More
The public hearing on Keystone XL in York, Nebraska next Wednesday, May 3rd is the first of just two scheduled opportunities for the public to give testimony with their concerns about this pipeline that is using eminent for private gain, trampling sovereign Native rights, and threatening our land, water and climate. (The only other pubilc testimony opportunity announced by the Public Service Commission will be at the conclusion of the intervenor proceeding, scheduled for Aug. 7-11 in Lincoln, NE.)
Bold and our allies Sierra Club and 350.org are sponsoring buses to the May 3 hearing in York from Omaha, Lincoln, and points north (Atkinson, Neligh). We’re asking for a $10 donation per bus rider, which also covers the cost of a sack lunch and snacks for everyone. We’ll be hosting a Rally and press conference during the lunchtime hour with speakers — stand with us!
REGISTER NOW: BUSES TO MAY 3 KEYSTONE XL HEARING IN YORK
Bold and Nebraska Sierra Club are hosting phone banks on Thursday (Lincoln), Sunday (Omaha) and Monday (Lincoln) to call our supporters and let them know about testifying at the May 3rd hearing, and the buses that are available to take everyone to the hearing. We’ll provide pizza and snacks at all of the phone banks!
PHONE BANKS: HELP RECRUIT FOR MAY 3 KXL PUBLIC HEARING
For many residents of Carter Road in Dimock, Pennsylvania, it’s been nearly a decade since their lives were turned upside down by the arrival of Cabot Oil and Gas, a company whose Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) wells were plagued by a series of spills and other problems linked to the area’s contamination of drinking water supplies.
With a new federal court ruling handed down late last Friday, a judge unwound a unanimous eight-person jury which had ordered Cabot to pay a total of $4.24 million over the contamination of two of those families’ drinking water wells. In a 58 page ruling, Magistrate Judge Martin C. Carlson discarded the jury’s verdict in Ely v. Cabot and ordered a new trial, extending the legal battle over one of the highest-profile and longest-running fracking-related water contamination cases in the country.
In his order, Judge Carlson chastised the plaintiff’s lawyers for “repeatedly inviting the jury to engage in unwarranted speculation” and wrote that, in his personal estimation, the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence to warrant the jury’s $4.24 million in damages. The original complaint for the case was filed in November 2009.
Nonetheless, Judge Carlson declined to throw out the lawsuit entirely, ordering Cabot to re-start settlement talks with the Ely and Hubert families. If those talks fail, the trial process will begin anew, extending the already years-long legal battle into months or even years to come.
“The judge heard the same case that the jury heard and the jury was unanimous,” Nolan Scott Ely, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “How can he take it upon himself to set aside their verdict? It’s outrageous.”
Retrials “Not as Rare”
Over time, Judge Carlson’s order noted, the plaintiffs’ legal complaints had been successfully winnowed down by Cabot, which was represented at trial by several lawyers from Norton Rose Fulbright, the tenth highest-grossing law firm in the world in 2016. The case now centers around a nuisance complaint.
Ely, whose background is in construction work, and his family and neighbors were represented at trial by a solo practitioner, Leslie Lewis, assisted by one other attorney. During one brief stint in the years leading up to the trial, the two families had no lawyer at all, but represented themselves. When the case began, they had the assistance of the firms Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik & Associates and the Jacob Fuchsberg Law Firm (the former employer of Lewis), which ushered in a settlement agreement with some of the 44 original plaintiffs.
But Ely and others were not satisfied with the offer, which included a non-disclosure agreement, and decided to proceed with the lawsuit.
John-Mark Stensvaag, an environmental law professor at the University of Iowa, said that orders to re-try cases “are not as rare as one might think.”
“This does not mean that the plaintiffs have no case,” he added, “it only means that, in [Judge Carlson’s] opinion, they have not presented a case justifying the jury’s verdict and should be given a second opportunity to present an adequate case.”
There’s little question that something is very wrong with the water on Carter Road, despite lingering questions in the legal battles centering around that contaminated water.
In 2016, shortly after the Elys and Huberts’ $4.24 million verdict, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report concluding that Dimock’s tainted waters carried dangerous levels of chemicals including arsenic, lithium, and 4-chlorophenyl phenyl ether (which is acutely toxic if swallowed). Further, the water was laced with enough methane that five of the homes on Carter Road had been at risk of exploding. Indeed, on New Year’s Day 2009, one of Dimock’s contaminated drinking water wells did explode.
Dadgummit! After John Ruhs, Nevada’s BLM State Director, said that he wanted to round up 4,000 wild horses in Elko County last summer (supposedly in response to the continued lies blaming wild horses and burros for the “deterioration of drought-stricken rangeland”), we’re noting that many mines that will use billions of gallons of water are now on the verge of expanding in Nevada.
Ruhs recently spoke at the Elko Convention Center, and stated that “We are pretty proud of the fact that this last year we have worked with the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association, the Nevada Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and NDOW to provide some public opportunities to talk about sage grouse land use amendments and what they mean to the grazing program. A lot of work still needs to be done.”
The BLM ALWAYS works with the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association. And the National Cattlemen’s Association. Actually, the BLM works FOR them. Notice that the focus of talking about sage grouse land use amendments is all about what they mean to thegrazing program?
Ruhs also lamented that wild horse and burro issues dominate a large part of the Nevada BLM and Ruhs went on to talk about the difficulties in wild horse management.
Wild horse and burro issues dominate? Like, bigger than all of the mines and outnumbering all of the livestock?
And talk about difficulties? How about all those abandoned mines in Nevada, John?
And management? There is only wild horse and burro “MISmanagement.”
Ruhs then said “We are somewhere in excess of 37,000 horses on the rangeland that is a big priority for us and it’s one of the things that I hope in the new administration that we will see some changes that will finally allow us to get some work done on the ground.”
We hope that the work that Ruhs is referring to getting done “on the ground” will include getting an accurate count of the wild horses and burros, rescinding some livestock overgrazing permits and making sure the extractive industries don’t use every last drop of water.
Why even bother to imply that the BLM “manages” anything, except impending environmental damage from the “multiple uses” that make a buck? Don’t stash the truth, John.
An aerial photo released Saturday by the California Department of Water Resources shows the damaged spillway with eroded hillside in Oroville, Calif. William Croyle/California Department of Water Resources via AP
During the first part of this month, there have been environmental concerns over fish that are trapped in pools which then alerted two federal agencies, namely, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) requesting that the repair on the Oroville Dam be scaled back in order to protect threatened fish.
Yes, it’s the same old song being sung by enviro politicos who now place even fish above the safety of the people who live below the tallest dam in America. After 100,000 plus people were already evacuated last month and are now living in harms way since returning to their homes, fish are still a greater concern than repairing a damaged dam in a timely manner over the safety and welfare of the people? What next, will flora and fauna be added to the fish list? More
“The Pentagon and its military-industrial complex of weapons suppliers are acknowledged to be the worst and most plentiful polluters on the face of the earth, with hundreds of military bases and weapons production sites that qualify for the designation of SuperFund sites. Those sites contain the most toxic by-products of war-making and the environmental pollution is so bad that the government and the taxpayers are on the hook for doing the impossible clean-up!”
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Definition of Anthropogenic: “an adjective used to describe the environmental pollution and pollutants that originate from human or corporate activity.”
Conscientious whistleblowers in the honor-the-earth, protect-the-water and assorted other environmental movements regularly point out the glaring reality that it is actually the amoral, conscienceless multinational corporations that are the main cause of local, regional and planetary environmental pollution.
But if an investigative journalist accidentally allows those assertions to be published or voiced, the media’s propaganda machine predictably goes into defensive mode or attack mode, first casting doubt on the whistle-blower’s assertions or else it issues an ad hominem attack upon the whistle-blower.
The corporation’s stable of lawyers and public relations department – with the assistance of assorted media mouthpieces – start mis-directing the public’s perceptions by repeatedly using the “time-honored” phrase of “human activity” or “man-made activity” for causing the problem (even though all the credible truly scientific evidence implicates “corporate activity” for the damage). More
“Northern Minnesotans, Native American Water Protectors ( like the heroes at Standing Rock), sportsmen, environmentalists, downstream businesses, wild rice harvesters, fish, game, birds and just plain working folks whose babies and other vulnerable beings with developing brains need non-toxic water to thrive or simply survive must understand that such relatively common catastrophes could destroy the aquifers in the BWCAW, Birch Lake, the Partridge River, the Embarrass River, the St. Louis River, the city of Duluth and ultimately, Lake Superior.”
Last year, Duluth News-Tribune published a Local News article with the title “EPA signals its support for final PolyMet review”.
The article ended with what I regard as an intentionally deceptive and woefully insufficient sentence: “Critics say the project is likely to taint downstream waters with acidic runoff”. More
Demonstrators from across the country have joined with American Indians in North Dakota to protest a private oil firm that plans to run an oil pipeline underneath the Missouri river, the only source of clean drinking water for thousands of people in the area. The pipeline is planned to transport about 470,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
By Ronald Ray
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of the Dakota and Lakota Nations of American Indians has been seeking peacefully to block further construction of the 1,172-mile-long Dakota Access oil pipeline, which threatens the tribe’s water supply and sacred spaces. The tribe, recognized by the U.S. as a sovereign nation by treaty, thus has earned the wrath of Big Oil plutocrats and, consequently, law enforcement authorities.
In a separate article in this issue we recount the jury acquittal of seven defenders of private property rights, who earlier this year occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, including sons of rancher Cliven Bundy. But unlike that peaceful protest, as well as the famous defense of the Bundy ranch in Nevada two years ago, the Indians have chosen to remain unarmed, despite sometimes facing vicious brutality by police and private security firms, which has included siccing biting attack dogs on protestors, arrests of reporters, and strip searches of arrestees.
The effort to protect the Missouri River—the Standing Rock Sioux’s primary water source—and sacred burial grounds now includes the participation of more than 300 native tribes and thousands of “water protectors” occupying federal land near the pipeline’s route south of Bismarck, N.D.
Flint: So far, only a few pawns have been sacrificed, and one minor knight has fallen, in the Machiavellian chessboard game that is being played with the lives of thousands who were poisoned by the water in Flint, Michigan. Governor Rick Snyder has not even been question by state or federal prosecutors. “It will only be through political activism and unrelenting protest that the actual political players will be charged and held accountable.”
“Those protected by power have been excluded from the process that is now being exacted against their underlings facing indictments.”
The game of chess is a complicated game employing zero sum, competitive Machiavellian strategies to protect key political or military principals. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king, and to protect the queen, the most powerful piece in the game, as long as possible. One fallen knight on the political chessboard of the Flint, Michigan water crisis is Susan Hedman, the EPA Regional 5 Administrator whose callous disregard for the health and safety of Flint citizens triggered her forced resignation although she has escaped any criminal liabilities.
Hedman was sacrificed to protect the EPA Queen, Gina McCarthy who could have used her congressionally authorized emergency powers under to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to seize control of Flint’s environmentally dangerous designs created by the governor and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Congress has given the EPA Administrator under SDWA Section 1431 this authority:
“…upon receipt of information that a contaminant that is present in or likely to enter a public water system or an underground source of drinking water, or there is a threatened or potential terrorist attack or other intentional act, that may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of persons, the EPA Administrator may take any action she deems necessary to protect human health.” [emphasis added]
“Gina McCarthy who could have used her congressionally authorized emergency powers to seize control of Flint’s environmentally dangerous designs.”
Well water, in the photo, remains plentiful at Venetucci Farm, Colorado, but water law requires purchase of an almost equal amount of “allocated” water before they can pump. Sources for allocated water are becoming harder to find.
Since 1992, a systematic attack on agriculture and food production in the United States has been developing, however the West has bore the brunt of this highly purposeful agenda which began with President Clinton in 1993 and is currently being promoted in California by the courts and Governor Brown. Consequently, ranchers have had their long-existing grazing and water rights methodically stripped away on Federal land and now private lands as well. Agricultural interests have been relentlessly sued by environmental groups and then over-regulated by the government.
Here is an example: The California State Water Board, recently invoked an emergency water allotment regulation without due process. Since January 2015 major changes have been made in the State of California with regard to private wells and ground water. There is now a new move by Governor Brown who recently signed a bill that changed water laws in the fall of 2014, which undermines the people’s property rights where private wells all over the state, will begin to be metered wirelessly by satellite. It is foreseen that the next step will eventually be mandated flow meters on pipelines coming from lakes, canals, creeks and rivers.
Already, state water agencies and/or community water districts have begun to implement allotment controls which allows the monitoring of well water meters and includes the use of fines and enforcement. I am familiar with someone in Northern California that was recently forced by P.G.& E. to put in a smart meter on his new well, and yes, it was mandated.
If local government takes this a step further and mandates flow meters on irrigation pipelines coming from a variety of water sources, there will very well be a limit to the amount of water that may be taken. What is now transpiring more and more is a rogue and unconstitutional government that is on a mission to monitor and control water locally and this fact is already happening in other states. Presently, broad government overreach, in matters of personal needs, such as food, water, shelter, & electricity, is off the charts. And let’s not forget about the other issues such as saving the frogs and toads by eradicating thousands of trout in the Sierras. There are thousands of other “endangered” species that are all part of a massive, decades old agenda that includes a tidal wave of lost rights and jobs.
As “we the people” entered into the year 2016 and beyond, were they aware of the plague that was consuming our country? It came at first as a black cloud creeping along the city streets and then entered through the crevices of our windows and doors and finally made its way into the very rooms of our houses. It began to sedate the masses into a near slumber but then retreated and continued following a path to higher ground. I followed the cloud as it rose above the hills and then began to touch the waters, the lakes and the rivers. It continued then to the higher elevations and to the utmost parts of the wilderness areas. There, the cloud stayed for a very long time over the vast Sierra Nevada Mountains until a mighty wind began to take it eastward.
Now, I was on a quest to find out a lot more about this strange phenomenon. Besides the cloud, there were other factors responsible for another findings that began to surface in my investigation. A trail of total devastation had found its way to the deepest parts of the sea to where 1/3 of all living things had died. While this fact had been covered up by government and the mainstream news, another gigantic black cloud spread out for hundreds of miles and continued to engulf hundreds of cities, thousands of factories and countless places of business which were all then forced to close. As the plague reached the Central Valley, the massive network of waterways from the Sacramento Delta down to Bakersfield, began to trickle away and then thousands of orchard trees began to die. The devastation was overwhelming but then I made another observation.
In spite of the seven year drought and future weather patterns that are not necessarily predictable, one would think that storing water for domestic use or agricultural needs such as growing food and raising livestock would be a priority for government. Not in California. Yet, fast track environmentalism in the last 20 years that caused the removal of 971 dams after Bill Clinton’s term as President, but at a later date, President George W. Bush, during his Presidency, opposed breaching dams in the Pacific Northwest.
Today, dam removal in the United States is now stronger than ever while the Western United States presently needs even more water than ever, but farmers in the Central Valley are fully cut off from their normal allotments. If we remember, years ago, the Auburn dam proposal was shelved because of the “potential” of earthquakes. Really, or was there something else going on under the radar?
PolyMet and the Rest of the Copper/Nickel Mining Industry are Lying to Us About the Safety of its Proposed Operations in NE Minnesota
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Attention: Governor Dayton (and your staff):
Knowing your innate sense of fairness and your sincere desire to do the right thing for the people of Minnesota, please take a few minutes (disregarding all the corporate lobbyists that are bugging you 24/7) and read the following items. Be sure to view a couple of the short videos.
It has been slightly over a year since North America’s worst mining waste disaster occurred at Mount Polley, British Columbia.
It was on August 4, 2014 that the Imperial Metals mine had its massive tailings dam burst, polluting aquifers, many streams and lakes and ultimately the migratory Sockeye salmon-bearing Fraser River, the longest river in British Columbia. The Fraser flows for 854 miles emptying into the Georgia Strait and the Pacific Ocean at the city of Vancouver.
Typical for such catastrophic mining industry failures, the Harper government of Canada tried to cover up the disaster and most of us on either side of the border were made unaware of the event. Thus, this disaster was censored out of both Canadian and American consciousness by a co-opted media that utterly failed to adequately report on it.
Immediately below are the links to two dramatic videos that were readily available to news agencies, but which were essentially not reported on, published or shown on the evening news of either local or mainstream media outlets (including Duluth’s own WDIO-TV, which has regular promotional blurbs for the mining industry on its evening newscasts).
Imperial Metals of Vancouver admitted that they had been dumping the following toxic metals into the Mount Polley slurry (aka “slime”) pond in the years leading up to the failure of the earthen dam. The list of toxic substances immediately below is taken from Environment Canada’s website
The list of metallic contaminants that were dumped in the tailings pond includes: Lead, Arsenic, Nickel, Zinc, Cadmium, Vanadium, Antimony, Manganese, and Mercury.
These 9 heavy metal contaminants in the slurry at Mount Polley are highly toxic and have no safe levels in drinking water or in the human or animal body. They are also lethal to plant life.
Imperial Metals also admitted to dumping the somewhat less toxic minerals into the tailings pond. That group included Zinc, Cobalt, Copper, Phosphorus and Selenium, minerals can be beneficial to living organisms, but only in nano- or micro- concentrations. All five are toxic in large concentrations.
You’ve objected to PolyMet’s mine plan with regulators, now call Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton and tell him that PolyMet’s proposed sulfide mine would do more harm than good.
Governor Dayton says he will make the final decision on whether to grant PolyMet a permit, and that it will be the most momentous and difficult decision he’ll make as Governor. We agree. That’s why it’s so important that you call and tell him how you feel about PolyMet’s sulfide mine proposal.
Call him right now at 800-657-3717 FREE. You can leave a message 24 hours a day.
Be sure to tell Governor Dayton that you’re concerned about the PolyMet sulfide mine proposal and tell him why you care. The most important thing is for you to pick up the phone and tell the Governor what you think – it doesn’t need to be perfect. Not sure what to say? Here’s a sample of a brief message:
My name is ____________ and I live in (city). I’m calling because I’m concerned about the impact that PolyMet’s proposed sulfide mine would have on Minnesota’s water. I think PolyMet would do more harm than good. Pollution from PolyMet threatens our clean water quality legacy and would pollute water for hundreds of years after the mine has closed. I think that’s a bad deal for Minnesotans. Thank you Governor Dayton for taking responsibility for making this decision – please put Minnesota’s water first when deciding on PolyMet.
The phone number is 800-657-3717 FREE. When you’re done, would you share this with your friends and family on social media? Use the share buttons below to get the momentum going.
By speaking up, we’ll protect Minnesota’s clean water from PolyMet’s pollution. Thanks again for taking action!
On Monday morning, the brave collective of Nebraska farmers and ranchers who refuse to sign over their land for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline will be in court to face down the foreign corporation’s threats of eminent domain — and we will be there to stand with them.
If you can’t make it to stand with us at the hearing, please consider a donation to help cover legal expenses for the farmers and ranchers who are fighting TransCanada and eminent domain to protect our land and water.
This is the lawsuit that stopped Keystone XL in its tracks in Nebraska, and also has the potential to stop the status quo of eminent domain for private gain in our state for the future.
Can’t be with us in court on Monday? Stand with us in solidarity.
This clip is from a March 24, 2015 Nebraska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission hearing on an out-of-state company’s application to export its toxic fracking wastewater into Nebraska, moving 80 truckloads carrying 10,000 barrels per day of pollution destined to be dumped into a disposal well in Sioux County — transferring all the risk onto Nebraska farmers and ranchers.
James Osborn, who commented below, is my new hero. – Debbie
SIGN the PETITION to the Nebraska Oil & Gas Commission “DON’T FRACK OUR WATER” HERE.
Before we get to our featured article below, it is important to note that the BLM continues to remove wild horses and burros because of “drought,” or because there’s “not enough” forage and water. We know there is a “man-made” drought because of the huge amount of water used by mining and other extractive industries. Advocates need to be aware of all of the issues surrounding big users of water from our aquifers. I’ve listed a few sources regarding California’s dire drought below, but there are similarities in other states and areas.
A recent Los Angeles Times editorialby the hydrologist Jay Famiglietti starkly warned: “California has about one year of water left.”
Kolhatkar states: “The truth is that California’s Central Valley, which is where the vast majority of the state’s farming businesses are located, is a desert. That desert is irrigated with enough precious water to artificially sustain the growing of one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, a $40 billion industry. Think about it. A third of all produce in the United States is grown in a desert in a state that has almost no water left.”
Kolhatkar also states “When water allocations from the federal government were cut, Central Valley farmers began drilling deep into the ground to pump water out of the state’s precious, ancient aquifer. Now, the pumping has gotten so out of control that water is being tapped faster than it can be replenished by rain or snowfall, leading to some parts of the land literally sinking. What’s worse, California’s farmers are irrigating their lands with water from a 20,000-year-old reserve, depleting and probably permanently damaging a reservoir that formed in the Pleistocene epoch.
Shockingly, until recently, California did not even regulate groundwater use, unlike states like Texas. Anyone could drill a well on their property and simply take as much water as they needed for their own use—a practice that dated back to the Gold Rush.”
The New York Times also recently ran a big article on the drought. You can read it HERE.
Hopefully the links to articles above and the article below will give you some information on a few (of the many) issues with water and what is happening with our aquifers. The wild horses and burros are “the canary in the coal mine.” – Debbie Coffey
Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought
“Nestlé is draining California aquifers, from Sacramento alone taking 80 million gallons annually. Nestlé then sells the people’s water back to them at great profit under many dozen brand names.”
How could the BLM be “unaware” that a company is using a pipeline? (Another reason to wonder how closely the BLM actually monitors the range.) According to True Oil (True Companies), “Belle Fourche Pipeline is a liquids pipeline operator that gathers and transports crude oil in the Williston Basin of western North Dakota and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.” To see a map of this pipeline in Wyoming, click HERE. According to an article in the Casper Star Tribune, True Companies have had many pipeline spills.
True Companies also owns 7True Ranches (ADA Ranch, Double Four Ranch, LAK Ranch, Rock River Ranch, Chalk Bluffs Ranch, HU Ranch, VR Ranch), 2 feedlots (LAK Feedlot, Wheatland Feedlot) and 2 Farms (LAK Farm, Wheatland Farm) in Wyoming. – Debbie
Almost a decade after Belle Fourche Pipeline Co., a True Oil company, told the Bureau of Land Management it was no longer using a pipeline 44 miles southeast of Buffalo, the pipeline leaked 25,200 gallons of crude oil onto public lands.
The company terminated its right of way permit in writing in 2006. At some point, without the knowledge of the federal agency, the company illegally resumed use of the pipeline, said Christian Venhuizen, BLM public affairs specialist.
Why and when the company continued to use the pipeline remains unanswered. Bob Dundas, environmental coordinator for Belle Fourche and Bridger pipelines, said he would forward the Buffalo Bulletin’s request for information and comment to someone who could answer questions related to permitting.
On May 20, 2014, Belle Fourche reported the oil spill to the BLM, after workers noticed oil seeping up from the ground, Dundas said. The BLM determined that Belle Fourche was in trespass, Venhuizen said, and fined Bridger Pipeline, a sister company, also owned by True Oil.
“…the Nevada State Engineer lacks information to set concrete triggers for monitoring and preventing or mitigating harmful impacts…”
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
February 10, 2015
Las Vegas Water Grab Appeals Rejected by Nevada Supreme Court
Opponents of the controversial proposal to pump and pipe groundwater from a vast region in eastern Nevada to Las Vegas say a Nevada Supreme Court ruling bolsters their case that the pipeline project can’t pass scientific, environmental or legal muster.
Great Basin Water Network believes that the February 6, 2015, ruling by the Nevada Supreme Court (15-04004) should be the final death knell of the ill-conceived and unsustainable project proposed by the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) and approved by the Nevada State Engineer. More
John Ruhs, BLM Nevada State Director
The PPJ Gazette 
