“We’re not in the way of the pipeline.
The pipeline is in the way of us,” he says.
Loewen says such camps are also expected to appear in the towns of Circle, 50 miles south of the Missouri, 50 miles up the Milk River in Hinsdale, and more than 100 miles to the south-east in Baker, where an oil on-ramp will be built for Bakken oil.
Let the pipeline through!
Floyd Azure said he plans to ask the Tribal Executive Board of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, which he chairs, to take legal action against the federal government over the Keystone XL pipeline.
Like the Missouri River crossing risk assessment, the scouring analysis doesn’t mention the tribes, the reservation, or the threat a pipeline spill poses to the drinking water network.
White Eagle says it takes 7 to 12 minutes for water to travel from the intake on the Missouri to the water treatment plant at the intersection of US Route 2 and Montana Highway 13 between Wolf Point and Poplar.
Sandra White Eagle, a Fort Peck tribal member and program director of the Assiniboine & Sioux Rural Water Supply System, says a leak from the Keystone XL pipeline would cut off the tribes’ drinking water.
It’s not clear why TransCanada’s recently published Missouri River safety assessments don’t mention the Fort Peck tribes’ drinking water.
According to the environmental impact statement’s “environmental consequences” section, spill impacts to the water networks and their intakes could include “the temporary loss of supply during spill response and cleanup.” The document also states the possibility of a spill reaching the tribal water networks is remote, but the explanation given is that “a distance of at least 10 miles downstream from the proposed pipeline was recommended for the identification of sensitive resources that could be affected by a release from the proposed pipeline,” and that the tribal water networks are “significantly beyond the proposed Project impact assessment buffer.” Simply put, the tribes’ water supplies are outside of the environmental impact statement’s 10-mile line, and therefore were not considered threatened, despite the fact that the EIS states in the same paragraph that a pipeline spill could shut them down.