They came, they saw, they despoiled the environment.
“They,” of course, being not the oil companies, but the protestors against the Dakota Access pipeline in south-central North Dakota. Their violent protest prompted the local Indian tribes who had invited them in to ask them to leave. But now the tribes and the state and local governments are in a panic.
One of their illegal encampments, which is in the river’s flood plain, contains mounds of trash, building debris and poop that will all be washed into the Missouri River when the snow melts and the flooding begins. A multi-million dollar cleanup operation will be required immediately to prevent this.
Federal and state officials are currently scrambling to make that cleanup happen, AP reports, and they estimate that it will require a few thousand pickup-trucks’ worth of trips to the landfill. The camp’s environmental footprint is massive — the best photograph of it that I’ve seen yet, taken Monday, was posted with this story last night.
“With the amount of people that have been out there and the amount of estimated waste and trash out there, there is a good chance it will end up in the river if it is not cleaned up,” Corps spokesman Capt. Ryan Hignight said.
Local and federal officials estimate there’s enough trash and debris in the camp to fill about 2,500 pickup trucks. Garbage ranges from trash to building debris to human waste, according to Morton County Emergency Manager Tom Doering….
Gov. Doug Burgum, State Engineer Garland Eberle and state Environmental Health Chief Dave Glatt on Tuesday issued a statement pushing for an accelerated cleanup. “We’re really fighting the clock,” Doering said Wednesday. “There’s more garbage down there than anybody anticipated.”
The tribes, which opposed the pipeline but stand to lose the most from the environmentalists’ pollution, are helping pay for the cleanup effort from the $6 million that had been donated to them to support their resistance to the pipeline.
