Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) and allied activists, friends, and supporters heartily welcome your participation in the upcoming, Eighth Panhandle Paddle weekend of opportunities to discuss, train for, and stage resistance to the fossil fuels and railroad industry degraders of human rights, environmental health, and the global climate.  Interior Northwest residents are coordinating and co-hosting annual activities in Sandpoint, Idaho, to unite in opposition to regional coal, oil, tar sands, petroleum coke, and hazardous materials trains, terminals, derailments, and pollution and Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway’s recently completed bridge and track construction across downtown Sandpoint, Sand Creek, and Lake Pend Oreille.  Amid the intensifying situations of north Idaho railroad expansion, federal and media criminalization of dissenters, and COVID-19 health and economic disasters during the last five years, we are reaching out to you, our network comrades, to share direct action skills and join with rail line communities in protesting fossil-fueled climate change via these free events on Friday through Sunday, September 27 to 29.  We would appreciate your involvement in the training workshop and paddle, your RSVP of your intentions for spots in kayaks, canoes, and carpools, and your assistance with distributing this event description and printing and posting the Eighth Panhandle Paddle flyer.

Direct Action Training

3 to 5 pm Friday, September 27

East Bonner County Library, Sandpoint

Regional climate activists and water protectors will provide several, interactive, training workshops, through talks and videos sharing frontline skills, stories, and insights.  Advocating grassroots, direct actions at the sites of environmental destruction, more than participation in expensive, ineffective, legal systems and other government processes, trainers will offer their expertise through presentation and practice sessions on topics such as knowing your rights, strategizing and tactical thinking, affinity group dynamics, target selection and scouting, action design, roles, and documentation, media communications, police interactions, de-escalation, security, safety, self-defense,  and jail solidarity.  Trainings have varied over the years, chosen by and adapted to participants supporting various ecological and social justice movements within U.S. political contexts.  Prior speakers have given advice on road and railroad actions, pipeline blockades, grand jury resistance, legal rights, digital security, and previously mentioned subjects.  Organizers holding these trainings anticipate reciprocally learning and strengthening the volunteer activism gaining momentum in the Idaho Panhandle.

At these informal discussions, participants can exchange issue information, expand knowledge, and brainstorm strategies and tactics for creatively engaging and catalyzing further community resistance and regulatory and legal recourse to BNSF’s Sandpoint Junction Connector project and railroad infrastructure, pollution, and risks in the Lake Pend Oreille area and beyond, which activists have denounced and challenged during each of the Panhandle Paddles [1-7].  Please bring ideas about campaign organizing and railroad monitoring and protesting, as we broaden conversations, camaraderie, and coalitions among activists.  We encourage everyone who plans to attend to RSVP in advance and request particular training topics and further event logistical information.  Join WIRT and guests anytime between 3 and 5 pm on Friday, September 27, in Community Room B of the East Bonner County Library, 1407 Cedar Street in Sandpoint.

Panhandle Paddle

10 am to 12 pm Sunday, September 29

City Beach and Dog Beach Parks, Sandpoint

For an eighth year, WIRT and allied activists are bringing their boats, bodies, and bravery to two locations, for on- and off-shore protests of Northwest fossil fuels trains, terminals, and derailments and north Idaho railroad bridge and track expansion.  To accommodate participants who are renting kayaks, paddleboards, or other manual watercraft from Sandpoint businesses that open at 9 am, activists are meeting at 10 am on Sunday, September 29.  Near the south boat ramp at City Beach Park in Sandpoint, we will launch a flotilla on Lake Pend Oreille, departing after participants arrive by land and water, to voyage around present and proposed railroad bridges.  By 11 am, another rally will converge after paddlers reach Dog Beach Park south of Sandpoint.  Please bring large banners and signs, visible to observers at great distances, and respond in advance to WIRT with your boat rental intentions and mobility needs, so we can cover the costs of watercraft and arrange transportation for folks who cannot walk to Dog Beach Park.

Event Support

Can you contribute toward kayak rental fees or offer boats or supplies for this event?  Could you drive enthusiastic, Panhandle Paddle participants to Sandpoint, or help with event publicity and travel expenses?  Can your group or organization endorse and/or co-sponsor this demonstration of people power?  To bolster this collective event, please offer assistance and materials in-person, online, or by mail.  Visit the WIRT facebook and website pages, and contact WIRT via phone, text, email, facebook, or website, with your questions and suggestions and for further event information and issue background.  We eagerly anticipate sharing these actions with you and your friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers on Friday through Sunday, September 27 to 29, grateful that regional community members are actively opposing massive, corporate, dirty energy infrastructure and transportation projects.

Issue Background (circa 2022)

Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway hauls about three daily, loaded, unit trains of dusty Powder River Basin coal to a Vancouver, British Columbia (B.C.) area, export terminal, one coal train every day on average to the Centralia, Washington, coal-fired power plant, and one daily, volatile, fracked Bakken crude oil or Alberta tar sands train to West Coast refineries and international ports from B.C. to California.  Fossil fuel infrastructure use, deterioration, and expansion along and over inland Northwest waterways recklessly endanger air, water, climate, lands, lives, and communities, with the ongoing, increasing pollution and risks of coal and diesel emissions and catastrophic train wrecks, spills, fires, and explosions occurring twice daily throughout the country.

Within nine months after a derailed oil train rupture and fire jeopardized a nearby school, water treatment plant, and the Columbia River in the small, scenic town of Mosier, Oregon, BNSF, Montana Rail Link (MRL), and Union Pacific (UP) imposed six north Idaho and northwest Montana train collisions and derailments within 45 miles of Sandpoint, during seven 2017 months.  Trains struck two vehicles with four teenagers, killing one, in Post Falls and Rathdrum in February and April; a grain train slid down a mountainside toward a dam above Moyie Springs in March; an empty coal train jumped the tracks close to homes in Ponderay and Kootenai two days later in March; and a corn train derailed and dented U.S. Highway 95 near a historically significant barn in Cocolalla, on the same May day as BNSF first brought cranes and machinery for test pile driving, to its bridge expansion site near Sandpoint [8, 9].  While WIRT directly confronted and documented BNSF’s preliminary, pile load testing for a second lake rail bridge at Dog Beach Park, between May and September 2017, railroad damages and deaths culminated in the mid-August, wrecked train dump of 7,000 pounds of coal into the Clark Fork River near Heron, Montana, upstream of Pend Oreille lake and river drinking water sources [10].  Fully laden, flammable, crude oil and hazardous materials trains frequented the tracks surrounded by deep mounds of wreckage and spontaneously combusting, smoldering coal, which remained unremedied during five weeks of an unusually intense, smoky wildfire season [11].

Since August 2014, when BNSF first proclaimed bridge expansion, and September 2015, when its plans dropped along with the price of oil, WIRT and regional activists and emergency responders have been preparing for a worst case scenario in north Idaho, as bully BNSF never fails to inflict ever more destructive havoc on rural communities [12-14].  After its January 1, 2020, derailment of a mixed freight train into the Kootenai River east of Bonners Ferry, BNSF deserted its submerged, lead locomotive for a month, as it leaked 2,000-plus gallons of diesel fuel into an international watershed.  Crews then dragged (“floated”) the half-million-pound engine across the river habitat of three endangered fish species, and dismantled and removed it on a river bar.  The fiasco that drew more co-opted, local praise for crew rescue than concern for a violated river serves as another of myriad examples of BNSF, MRL, and UP dismissal and abuse of public and environmental health and safety in their north Idaho, industrial, sacrifice zone [15-17].  Unabated by Northwest citizen outcries and conservation and climate group lawsuits, BNSF assaults on the Clark Fork-Pend Oreille watershed, which provides over 40 percent of the fresh water in the Columbia River Basin, escalated with construction of doubled tracks across north Idaho, three new railroad bridges as part of its keystone, Sandpoint Junction Connector project, and other additional infrastructure that together accommodate the constant emissions and risks of coal and diesel dust and fossil fuels and hazardous freight derailments.

Decisions in 2018 and 2019 by the U.S. Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers and Idaho departments of Environmental Quality (IDEQ) and Lands (IDL) permitted BNSF’s fossil fuels pipeline-on-rails bridge expansion through Sandpoint and almost one mile over Idaho’s largest, deepest lake, Pend Oreille.  In March 2019, railroad and state attorney general lawyers convinced a Moscow judge to dismiss WIRT’s expensive, underdog, district court case against an IDL encroachment permit for the project [18, 19].  Among countless, significant, cumulative impacts to the environmental and community health and safety of north Idaho, BNSF’s $100 million construction gamble drove over 1,000 piles into regional drinking water, threatened bull trout critical habitat, train-spewed coal and other pollution deposits, and the natural amenities foundation of the Sandpoint area tourism and recreation economy, for second (and likely, later third) parallel railroad bridges and temporary work barges facilitating riskier, more derailment-vulnerable, bi-directional train traffic  [20].  Besides daily, WIRT vigilance and documentation of every westbound, BNSF, unit train of dangerous, black tanker and coal cars moving toward disasters waiting to happen on Sandpoint, Lake Pend Oreille, and downstream, fossil fuels frontlines, we have investigated, photographed, and recorded numerous, BNSF project, document and construction site snafus since May 2017, as we scheme ongoing information releases and legal maneuvers, in response to predictable, blatant, BNSF disregard for the integrity of north Idaho environments and economies.  Please join us in resistance to railroaded fossil fuels and resulting climate chaos!

[1] Panhandle Paddle!, August 21, 2015 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[2] Totem Poles and Kayaks Against Fossil Fuels: Second Panhandle Paddle, August 22, 2016 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[3] Third Panhandle Paddle, August 19, 2017 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[4] Fourth Panhandle Paddle, September 3, 2018 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[5] Fifth Panhandle Paddle, August 28, 2019 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[6] Sixth Panhandle Paddle, September 7, 2020 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[7] Seventh Panhandle Paddle, September 18, 2022 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[8] Sandpoint and Spokane Stand with Mosier, May 29, 2017 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[9] Seventh, Area, Train Accident in Six Months!, July 24, 2017 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[10] On Sunday night, August 13, 2017…, August 22, 2019 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[11] At 3:22 pm on Monday, August 21, a few hours after a continent-wide, solar eclipse…, August 21, 2017 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[12] BNSF Plans Second Bridge over Idaho Chokepoint, August 27, 2014 Railway Age

[13] Plans for Second Rail Bridge across Lake Pend Oreille Put on Hold, September 16, 2015 Spokesman-Review

[14] Herb Goodwin at the Sandpoint Blessing (Lummi Totem Pole Journey 2016), August 28, 2016 New American Underground

[15] BNSF Locomotives in River, USCAN and WIRT Meetings, #No2ndBridge Petition, Frontline Support, January 13, 2020 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[16] Fossil Fuels Train Pollution Protest, January 27, 2020 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[17] Fossil Fuels Train Pollution Protest Report, February 8, 2020 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[18] BNSF Bridges EIS or EA March!, May 31, 2019 Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[19] Category Archives: BNSF Bridges, Wild Idaho Rising Tide

[20] Petition to Deny and Revoke Permits for the BNSF Sandpoint Junction Connector Project, September 30, 2018 Wild Idaho Rising Tide