It's an unseasonably warm day in October twenty twenty four. Rolling hills covered in golden grasses stretch on either side of Highway eighteen oh six on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and I'm riding in a truck with Doug crow Ghost. He leads the Standing Rocks Sioo Tribes's Department of Water Resources. Behind us is a truck pulling upontoon boat. We're with a crew of people heading to the Missouri River about ten miles downstream from the Dakota Access Pipeline, which Doug calls Dapple.
We're documenting that if there's a pipeline break. Dapple's saying that they can get these big skimmer boats on the water to go up there to start getting rid of the oil, and we've been saying, hell no, there's no way, but we're.
Gonna document in any way, and we're gonna drive along take pictures of there's some certain.
They're trying to find out if the Missouri River is high enough so that emerging seaboats could clean up an oil spill.
But the catches.
For our plan today to work, we have to be able to get our boat on the river, and as we arrive at the marina, it becomes clear that a pontoon ride might not be happening today. Doug starts chatting through the window with the local guy.
Are you freaking kidding me? It's he can't it's unusable.
The water level is too low.
You think you can get that pontoon in there? No way gets stuck. Yeah.
Yeah.
To some degree, this proves Doug's point. He figures out, if we can't even get the pontoon on the water, then Energy Transfer isn't going to be able to launch big, heavy emergency boats to skim away oil.
I drove out here last week to check it out, and it was good. I'm about to all right, then, little shit.
Doug's a big talker, and he's got his hands in a lot of things. As the Standing Rock Tribe's water guy, the Dakota Access Pipeline has been a big part of his job. To the Standing Rock Nation, the pipeline is among the biggest threats to its primary drinking water source, the Missouri River, so Doug spent countless hours trying to make sense of Energy Transfer's emergency plans what they intend to do if the oil leaks out. He's also helped
with the tribe's ongoing legal fight against the pipeline. In late twenty twenty four, Standing Rock is getting ready to file a new lawsuit to stop the flow of oil, and the water level measurements they take today are mental help prove that the pipeline is unsafe. We get out of the truck and inspect the water line.
Look look at how far it went down just for this not even to be dried yet, how would that happen? The Army Corps of Engineers, the mismanagement of the river.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's legal fight against the pipeline isn't against energy transfer, it's against the US Army Corps of Engineers. That's the federal agency that in charge of granting permission for the pipeline to pass through federal land, including under the Missouri River. It was the Army Corps that the tribe furssued back in July twenty sixteen, right before the Standing Rock protests really kicked off. Back then, they were trying to get the federal government to require
a deeper review of the pipeline route. Fast forward to today, the tribe's legal fight to stop the pipeline still going on. It wasn't until Trump came into office in twenty seventeen, as the Standing Rock protests were already winding down, that the Army Corps did grant permission to drill under the river. But after the pipeline was already installed, a judge took back that permission and said that the project does require a deeper environmental review. Eight years after the oil started flowing,
that review and environmental impact statement still isn't finished. The pipeline operates with no official permission from the Army Corps, and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe is sick of it. The Army Corps of Engineers also runs a series of dams along the river. Dam's Standing Rock and other Indigenous nations never wanted.
So this new.
Lawsuit DOUG is helping prepare. It's not just going to focus on the pipeline, but rather on multiple environmental justice issues that this nation has been putting up with for decades. Pulling up behind us is a whole team of emergency managers from the tribal government, as well as an elected member of the tribal council and a reporter from a local newspaper.
Yeah, yeah, We're bade everybody.
Doug briefs us on the plan. Since it's too shallow for the pontoon here, we're going to head to the next closest option for launching a boat, which is twenty minutes away at Fort Rice.
Two things are going to happen there. One, it's gonna be up, the water is going to be good. We're going to get in the boat and we're going to go to Dapple's site. Or we get down there and it's just like this, it's unusable and we docu that as well. All right, load up.
Then, you.
Know, in all these years covering the Standing Rock movement, I've never actually gotten out on the water. But I have no idea as we turn onto the highway that I'm about to get even more intimate with the Big Buddy than I'd bargained for.
This season of.
Drilled, we bring you Slapped the story of an indigenous nation fighting for its water, an environmental nonprofit facing extinction, and an energy giant using the courts to punish protesters. I'm Alan Brown. The draft of Energy Transfers Environmental Impact Statement for the Dakota Access Pipeline was released about a year and a half ago. And it describes the company's version of what would happen if the pipeline. It says that within thirteen minutes of a leak, energy Transfer would
shut down the pipeline. They'd launch their boats into the river from a dock like we just visited, and they'd isolate the spill with containment booms, skimmers, absorbent material, and vacuum suction would collect the oil. If the water was too low to launch a boat, energy Transfer would use cranes to lower watercraft into the Missouri. And they say they have airboats on hand. But Doug and other Standing Rock leaders.
Don't buy it.
For one, the report was written by a company with ties to the oil and gas industry. He tells me about it as we drive to the next closest boat dock.
We told him that's a conflict of.
Interest making matters worse. Large sections of the emergency plans and the spill response report are blacked out, redacted. Standing Rock leaders say they have no ability to check the work of Energy Transfer in the Army Corps.
How can you really comment on something you can't see? And this is what we always said, where's the transparency?
A final decision on the Eastman. The permission to drill under the river is expected in the next year, but the writing is on the wall. With Donald Trump about to become president, the Army Corps will likely grant it. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe decided they weren't going to sit around and wait before filing a new lawsuit.
Anyway, ask me more questions.
As we drive, I'm noticing the way the sun is struggling to pierce through a kind of fog.
Do you think this hayes is from the wildfires? Seriously, that's a serious question.
Oh, oh, yeah it is.
North Dakota Governor Doug Bergham declared a state of emergency a week ago. High temperatures, dry conditions, and wind are creating the perfect conditions for wildfires. Earlier in the week, when I was visiting here, I driven by fields scorched by wildfire. The fire had meandered through agricultural land and jumped the road. The blackened areas had the settling appearance
of an oil spill. The climate impacts of burning oil were a key issue in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and here in North Dakota it isn't hard to see how the climate crisis is impacting everyday life. Doug takes a turn on boat dock road. His team didn't used to use this dock too often, but with the water levels being so low, that's changed.
When did it start becoming an issue?
Oh, it's ten years, at least ten years every year usually around this time, and then springtime it'll flood, and in wintertime it'll go low.
And it just depends on the runoff a lot of times too. Of Montana's headwaters if they had a good winter and a nice runoff. Oh my god, Yes.
The headwaters of the Missouri River are in Montana. In twenty seventeen, universities in the state did a study on how climate change is impacting the river. The researchers found that not only has Montana's snowpack in the mountains declined, the snow that does accumulate is melting earlier in the year. By late summer, there's less water than there used to be. That means more drought. Over the next century, what we're
seeing today is expected to get worse. A deciding factor for how bad the droughts and fires will get is how many fossil fuels continue to be extracted, transported and burned its products, like the oil carried by the Dakota Access pipeline, that are making the climate crisis worse.
So check it out.
Kids.
If I'm going to go big one under day.
Now, if I need this jack attack.
Debate leaving my coat in the car. It's October in North Dakota, but the temper sure is climbing above eighty degrees. Don Holmstrom climbs out of the backseat and heads down the ramp toward the dock. Don is the former director of the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Board's Western Regional Office. Now he works as a safety consultant for Standing Rock. He pulls out a sonar depth finder device and it says it's deep enough for us to launch will Some
of the crew sets up the pontoon. I chat with Harold Tiger and Erica Porter, who are emergency managers.
I'm curious to.
Hear more about the wildfire.
From the reports I received, it was caused by a combiner that was combining in the field a caught fire.
It turns out they responded to that fire I saw. They tell me this is the time of the year when farmers harvest. Hay All it took to spark. The fire was a combiner hitting a rock.
And we closed down the road while that fire skipped over Highway sixty three.
Was so bad that it's hard to see through the smoke plne across that highway.
I guess how unusual is this?
How unusual is a wildfire like what we call it curveball climate?
Well, and it has the drastic effect on our people. I mean, things are not happening normally at certain times of the year. So we need to start looking at that and looking outside of the box to get better prepared for those things.
The climate crisis is often called a threat multiplier. The oil in the pipeline stands to make the climate crisis worse, and also the climate crisis stands to make the impact of any oil spill worse. And there's one more piece to this puzzle that will get to in a second. The Missouri River dams. We climb onto the pontoon. Ready, we putter into the little bay that leads to the river. For a second, it seems like our ning might end before it's begun.
Are we getting stuck?
We aren't yet. Erica cranks up the pontoon.
Jams there that pontube fun.
Dawn drops the depth finder into the glassy water. As we troll south through a basin that's wider than a football field. Doug drives carefully navigating the braided channels that cut pathways through muddy sandbars. The constant fluctuations of the river mean the curves of the channels are unpredictable.
The stretch of the river that borders.
Standing Rock is called Lake Owahe. It's a reservoir that was created in the early nineteen sixties. The Upper Missouri River today is actually divided up by a series of dams. That's because in the nineteen forties, the US created a program called the pics Loane Plan. That plan is the origin story of the Standing Rock nations poisoned relationship with the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps wanted to build
a series of dams to control the Missouri River. The dams were meant to ease flooding, provide power and irrigation, and also make it easier for boats to transport people and products. The thing is, the indigenous nations along the river didn't want the dams. The US government built them anyway. They flooded and destroyed entire communities, drowning grave sites, as
well as sources of food and income. People from standing rocks say they were never adequately compensated, though it's not clear that any price could have made the dams worth.
What was lost wiped all that up and wiped out our cherry trees or plum trees are you know?
It was hunting grounds. And so they this army corps of engineers when they flooded our lands, they wiped out a way of life.
You know, Davis Redbear was born just after the dam flood at the land, but she grew up hearing about what happened. And as far as Doug is concerned, the injustice of the dams is ongoing. The climate crisis may be helping create drought conditions, but it doesn't explain how quickly the water level is going up and down.
Yeah, so what's the deal. So the obviously the dam the water is low. Why would they why would it be low right now?
Why is it low right now?
Because they're trying to keep the level of the of the Brassouri River at average, at an average level down in Kansas and Missouri for navigations for barges.
So Yeah, the Army Corps controls the release of water from reservoir to reservoir. They're attempting to balance a tangle of different needs as they do this, from preventing flooding to protecting endangered species, to letting people fish to making sure companies can transport products. In Doug's view, the Army Corps prioritizes the commercial needs of people outside the bounds of the reservation Lake owahe ends up stuck in a constant state of flux.
So I call our Lake Hawaihi the bastard reservoir of the Pixloan Act. And it is, and you've seen it today today is you know what you guys. I am so glad you guys came to Davis Don because you guys are seeing firsthand what I have to go through almost on a weekly basis. When we go out to do sampling on the river, you can't get out there.
When Doug and the other Standing Rock members on the boat today think about the threats to the water, it's about not just the pipeline but also the dam.
I mean, it's just it's so unjuff.
But I just love this. It's so beautiful.
I'm so glad we came on. I know me too, It's so beautiful.
The Army Corps denied my request for an interview. A spokesperson told me that the Army Corps operates the reservoirs according to the law, with guidance from a master water control manual. The spokesperson said water levels fluctuate seasonally based on precipitation, runoff, and multiple congressionally authorized purposes, including flood control, navigation, water supply, recreation, and fish and wildlife. These operations are system wide and are not managed for any single user
or economic interest. There's another thing influencing Standing Rocks lawsuit strategy, the Green Peace case. In its original conspiracy lawsuit, Energy Transfer claimed that green Peace committed defamation by saying that the pipeline would poison the Standing Rocks Shoo Tribe's water. They also said it's defamation to say the pipeline would catastrophically alter the climate. The threats to their water and to the climate are two of the Standing Rocks Szo
tribe's key arguments against the pipeline. Energy Transfer suit was suggesting these threats don't exist, and if you're going to make claims like that in a lawsuit, then you have to prove it. Energy Transfer would have to hand over internal documents proving how safe the pipeline really was, but they argued that sharing so many documents was too much
of a hassle. To avoid having to turn them over, they dropped the claims about water and climate safety, but Greenpeace did not drop their request for documents, and as they continued to fight about it, some documents ended up bubbling to the surface that weren't supposed to. A report that was supposed to remain confidential appeared on a court website for anyone to download. An engineering firm called Exponent had prepared this report. It was co written by a
former Exxon engineer. Greenpeace had commissioned it as part of its legal defense, and it described something the Standing Rocks Too tribe had never heard about before. It said that there had been problems when Energy Transfer's drilling contractor, Michaels, was drilling under Lake Owahe Doug brings the pontoon to a.
Stop, so basically we're at ground zero and where there would be a pipeline break.
That means we're floating above the Dakota Access pipeline. It's buried ninety five feet below the lake bed. Doug explains what the exponent report revealed. He takes us back to January twenty seventeen, when energy transfers set up two huge drills on either side of the river.
At the same time, we had a camp on the other side of that cliff over there where people from around the world were protesting to stop it, and these guys over here were saying, gear it up, let's get it done.
The two drills, tungsten carbi teeth, cut and ground the rock and soil under the river into fragments, each guiding a drill pipe behind it. The drill pad had been transformed to resemble a military base.
If you guys remember seeing pictures, they had a berm around the drill pad. They had these huge it looked like Kuwait. They had armed twenty four to seven guards. They had these big flood lights.
Over the course of a week, the two drills chewed away pilot holes underneath either side of the river until they met in the middle the day after Valentine's Day. As they traveled, thick mud was pumped at high pressure from the shore through the drill pipes and out the nozzles. At the drill bits at the end.
And they use fluid the loop up the sediment and the rock and it's just going and going.
The drilling mud was made of betonit, clay, and water, along with some unknown chemical additives. Oil companies usually describe drilling mud as being non toxic, but at times it has been found to include harmful pollutants and it can hurt delicate ecosystems. Drilling mud carried away the fragmented earth. That mud and earth was supposed to flow back to the shore into an excavated pit, but some of it
never did. The amount of drilling mud that disappeared was enough to fill two Olympic sized swimming pools one point four million gallons. All that drilling mud had apparently oozed into the surrounding environment.
What does it contaminate? What does that mean to our water intake? I mean, I got those kind of questions.
And so they don't know if it's still in or if it's underneath the water, or if it's or went down river. They don't know nothing. That word didn't say, the board didn't say, so it's.
Unclear what happened to all that mud. Exponent wrote that there's no indication Energy Transfers contractors did any water testing dug in the Tribeer concerned that there could have been something poisonous mixed into the mud that disappeared under the river, which is a big problem because again, this is the standing Rock Zioo Tribe's drinking water source. An Energy Transfer has had issues with drilling mud before. The company was
building pipelines in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Around the same time it was building Dapple in North Dakota. In Pennsylvania, thousands of gallons of drilling mud leaked into wetlands. The company didn't report it to state regulators, who found out that some of the mud contained unapproved additives. It even polluted tap water and caused sinkholes. The company's subsidiary, Sunoco, pleaded no contest to fourteen criminal counts related to those drilling
mud spills. In Ohio, two million gallons of drilling mud leaked into a wetland, and state regulators discovered that some of it was laced with diesel, and they weren't told about that by Energy Transfer and their contractors, and so obviously they were pretty mad about it. This is Don Holmstrom, the consultant who used to work at the Chemical Safety Poort. Energy Transfer got in pretty big trouble for its drilling
mud spills. The US Environmental Protection Agency proposed in twenty twenty two that the company be banned from any contracts with the federal government. The decision was never finalized, but it meant that Energy Transfer was kept out of federal contracts until earlier this year. Don has a plane to catch and it's time to head back.
You guys got any other questions as we go? Just asked Don. Let's let's maneuver back to the port. See if we CANDOCT Titanic.
All right, let's go.
I need somebody to look out in the front for icebergs. No kidding, right, pull it.
As we motor back the way we came, I think about what I'd researched before this trip. The draft andvironmental impact statement from the Army Corps says there's only about a one in one thousand chance that the Dakota Access Pipeline will spill under the Missouri River in a given year, But as for the entire length of the pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline has already leaked thirteen times since an entered operation in twenty seventeen. The largest leak was nearly
two hundred gallons. The draft Environmental Impact Statement says that spill risk is inherent to pipelines. You can mitigate it, but you can't eliminate it. Then there's the climate crisis. Scientists say that if we have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate impacts, we cannot build new fossil fuel infrastructure. According to climate scientists, math as long as the oil flows, the water is not protected.
In the pontoon.
We're chatting idly about the upcoming election as we motor back.
I've developed a healthy skepticism about well, even people that you had up voting for, because maybe they're the lesser of the.
Of the problem.
The pontoon stalls were stuck.
I thought we were going to be able to right there.
It's the same on this side. Yeah up.
The deep channel has turned unexpectedly into a sandbar on either side of us.
I don't think we can go forward.
The boat is lodged in the muck of the river. Four of our crew jump into push.
Yeah, Okate, let me know when you got ready.
Doug gets ready to rev the motor.
Ye let me know when you.
Read they're pushing, But this.
Thing is not moving.
Is it even budget?
It's not looking good. And here, dear listener, the audio cuts out because the time had come for your host to get intimate with the Missouri River. I roll up my pants to my knees and jump in. Now there are six of us pushing, and with the mud of the Missouri River oozing between my toes, I begin to see the standing rock. Sioux Tribe's point. How quickly could a crew really navigate these channels in an oil spill emergency? And how much lower will this river drop as the
climate crisis deepens? We push again. The pontoon inches a few feet forward, but it's still stuck. We keep pushing. It springs forward.
Nothing happened. We're good to meet you. Yeah, great to meet you. Travel.
Doug and Dawn consider the trip of success we'd unintentionally illustrate at their point. Three days later, the tribe files its lawsuit on Indigenous People's Day. Months later, in the courtroom in the winter of twenty twenty five, the things we grappled with on the water come up in court. Energy Transfer wants Greenpeace to pay them back for delaying
the start of the pipeline's commercial operations. They say that the pipeline was supposed to be pumping oil by January twenty seventeen, but didn't start operating until June, and that cost them eighty million dollars. But Greenpeace is arguing that what actually prevented Energy Transfer from finishing the project is that they didn't have the Army Corps permission to drill under the Missouri River. They didn't have the easement. Green
Peace wasn't stopping the oil from pumping. A federal agency was standing in the way. If green Peace was solely responsible for the easement delay, then that means that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its lawsuit and its calls to action the money it poured into the pipeline fight, had no hand in the Army Corps decision. The theory of the lawsuit doesn't match with what happened and removes
the indigenous nation from the story entirely. Energy Transfer is also saying that it was Greenpeace's divestment campaign that forced Energy Transfer to delay its loan refinancing by about two years. They say that the delay was because Greenpeace spread lies about Energy Transfer. The alleged lies were meant to convince
Banks to divest from the pipeline. An Energy Transfer wants the environmental nonprofit to pay them nearly one hundred million dollars for this, except that Energy Transfer's own records conflict
with this story. The pipeline company took careful notes when they're board met and several sets of board meeting minutes say that Energy Transfer decided to hold off on refinancing not because of anything about Greenpeace, but because the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was in the middle of their legal battle with the Army Corps, and the banks wanted to wait and see what would happen. Once again, Energy Transfer's story of Standing Rock erases the role of the Standing
Rock Sioux tribe. I call up Doug, the tribe's water guy, about what's happening with the lawsuit. He wasn't too impressed with the fifty five thousand dollars that Energy Transferred as Greenpeace put into the movement, or the ninety thousand dollars that they say Greenpeace's former executive director fundraised.
I'm like, what are they suiting up for day to do any What did they do?
He tells me the tribe took in eleven point seven million dollars in donations from people who wanted to support the pipeline resistance camps and the legal fight. He knows the number because he managed the budget.
We paid over sixty thousand dollars just for porta potties.
That's right.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe spent more on toilets for a couple months than green Peace allegedly donated throughout the entire movement. The money came via the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's crowdfunding pages, but also an envelope sent directly to the tribal office.
Envelopes of you know, fifty dollars envelopes with cash or checks in them for twenty five dollars. Whether they donated five dollars or five hundred thousand dollars, they all got a thank you letter from the chairman with our ie number and their tax break number. So we did that. I want to say twenty thousand people.
To Doug, the arguments in this lawsuit just don't make sense.
Well, I'd say this is all a bunch of bullshit, and I could tell you that nothing ever happened with Greenpeace they didn't do shit. They don't have the right to sit here and even talk about Dapple and definitely Energy Transfer, doesn't you guy? You know, and I would say this is all just a ploy to try to find a scapegoat.
Greenpeace wants to talk about that leak drilling mud in court, but Judge Gehen says they're not allowed to. Energy Transfer didn't answer my questions about the report. During his testimony, the project manager, Mike Futch, said there were no problems with the drilling, but a regulator at the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality told the North Dakota Monitor that he was aware of some issues with drilling mud. The
regulator just didn't think it was a big deal. This is something we see happening virtually on every horizontal boring we see.
He said, there's.
A world where the Dakota Access pipelines, oil and drilling mud spills are considered normal and acceptable. But decades of experience have shown the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe that neither the State of North Dakota, nor the US Army Corps of Engineers, nor Energy Transfer are authorities they can trust.
And honestly, the tribe was not so sure they could trust Greenpeace either, because there was a moment last year when Greenpeace was offered an opportunity to avoid all of this one that meant throwing the standing tribe under the bus. That's next time on Drilled. Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. This season was reported and written by me Allen Brown. Our senior editor is Audrey Quinn. Additional editing
by Tristan attone E Grist. Our producer and sound designer is Ray Pang, mixain mastering by Martin Saltz Austwich and Peter Duff. Fact checking by Shilpa Gindia. Our first Amendment attorney is James Wheedon. Our Impact producer is Lindsay Crowder. Marketing by Maggie Taylor. Original artwork for this season was created by Victor Pascual of Digital Navajo. Our theme music is by Dear Lady, and the show was created and executive produced by Amy Westerville. The Center for Median Democracy
supported document review for the season. For related stories and to support our work, check out Drilled dot Media. To follow my work, check got my newsletter Eco files at a Lean Brown Dot Ghost dot io.
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