Way back in 1998 or so I spent a bit of time picking things up.
It was the end of Enbridge’s Terrace B expansion, which is a fancy way of saying they were building another 36-inch pipeline as an addition to their mainline system running through southeast Saskatchewan. After having worked on the right-of-way, swamp ditch and road bore crews, I ended up on the final cleanup crew before the job wrapped up.
Final cleanup was just that – we made the last pass to ensure everything was back the way it should be. Tires for crossing roads with tracked equipment were collected. We dug up geotechnical cloth from the ramps that formed temporary roadway approaches. If the geotech got tore to shreds by the tooth of the excavator bucket due to the ground being frozen, well, guess what: Brian got to bend over and pick up all the pieces. The end result, once we were through, was a clean right-of-way with a nice smooth layer of topsoil across it. A few years later, only a sharp eye would even know that a pipeline had been built there.
I should point out that there was very, very little, if any, garbage to be picked up. The crew was fastidious during the whole job.
Let’s contrast that with the self-proclaimed “water protectors” who set up a protest camp around the northeast corner of Standing Rock Sioux reservation in southern North Dakota.
I expect a lot of people who have worked on the open prairie in winter expected the protests to thin out when winter hit. This winter hit North Dakota harder than most years, with more snow than in recent memories. I expect most flood plains will flood. Most of the protesters left, many down in the mouth from President Donald Trump’s get-it-done actions.
Chief of Police Jason Ziegler of the City of Mandan, N.D., appeared in a Feb. 24 Facebook video posted by the Morton County Sherriff’s Department. It showed the clear out of camp of its last protesters and the ensuing cleanup.
Chief Ziegler said, “The protesters disrespected the land tremendously. You can look at the garbage and the trash. Most of these tents are filled with rubbish and, just collections of stuff. Most of it is unusable. You can see where they have abandoned cars. They built structures where they’re not allowed to build structures, so we’re going to have to remediate the land and make sure the mitigation of this entire preserve here, that is owned by the Corps is completely redone. It’s just very sad to see people who say they’re here to protect the water, and the land, to do something like this, to anybody.”
The video showed an excavator knocking over some sort of building. Numerous shots displayed the incredible amount of garbage left behind. Another video showed loaders, dozers and skid steers fighting the mud to clear the flood plain before the water rises.
If, back in 1998, we had left anything on the right-of-way, we’d be kicking our lunch pails down the road. The contractor would likely have been financially penalized and the pipeline company could be held to account by the National Energy Board.
The howling from the oilfield community has been growing to a crescendo, and for good reason. I’m seeing posts on this topic all the time. If we were to leave such disasters in our wake, the public should hang us out to dry, and rightly so. But the rig hands, oilfield maintenance guys, operators, truckers and pipeliners aren’t the ones who have loudly proclaimed they are holier-than-thou.
In this case, the oilfield community’s daily actions are absolutely holier than those of the protesters.
The pile of garbage remaining at Standing Rock has truly fouled any claim to righteousness among the protesting community. It’s pretty hard to take criticism from people like that, when our industry toils under such strict regulatory enforcement.
Hopefully the final cleanup of the protest site can be accomplished before the waters rise and carry all that garbage down river. It’s a good thing they have diesel-powered equipment to do the job.
Water protectors? Huh. The proof has been in the pudding, or the garbage.
