Sometime before December 5, a North Dakota pipeline started leaking oil near Belfield. True Companies, which operates the pipeline, has electronic monitoring equipment to detect leaks. The fancy equipment didn’t work. The leak was discovered by a landowner. By the time the company shut off the oil, it had “migrated about almost 6 miles from the spill site along Ash Coulee Creek, and it fouled an unknown amount of private and U.S. Forest Service land along the waterway.” Now the company says that “more than” 176,000 gallons of crude oil were spilled. The spill is about 150 miles from where the Standing Rock water protectors are camped out, trying to prevent Energy Transfer Partners from drilling under the Missouri River. Continue reading
Tag Archives: oil pipeline
Spill, spill, and spill again: Oil across the continent
Photo by Steven Storm from protest in Santa Barbara after May oil spill, published under Creative Commons license
A new, state-of-the-art double-layer pipeline failed last week in Alberta, causing a massive leak of 1.3 million gallons of oil, water and sand. But that’s not all: July has been a banner month for oil spills, and it’s not over yet. The entire year has seen spill after spill, from pipelines and oil train derailments. Here’s a brief recap of just those spills that made it into my files — and the Wisconsin legislature’s capitulation to Enbridge. Continue reading
Filed under environment
This land is your land, and this river is your river
I grew up on the Crow River. I remember walking with Grandpa on the cow paths worn along the hillside above the river, and measuring flood or drought against the big rock at the end of the island. We found wild strawberries on those hillsides, and picked prickly gooseberries later in the summer. Mending pasture fences, I watched the bluebirds nest each year in an old, gray wooden fencepost.
In 1976, our Meeker County part of the Crow River was added to Minnesota’s Wild and Scenic Rivers list, along with parts of the Mississippi, Kettle, Rum, Minnesota and Cannon rivers. Now an oil pipeline crosses the wild and scenic Crow River, and this year the pipeline company proposes to double the amount of oil that the pipeline carries. Continue reading
Filed under environment
Mary Turck
News Day 