On Wednesday, May 16, the second to the last road-hogging convoy of Alberta tar sands equipment, state cops, pilot vehicles, and flaggers will likely rampage Spokane and Spokane Valley streets.  Although we cannot promise any dirty energy resister action against ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil until we hear from our Occupy Tri-Cities Port of Pasco scout around 7 or 8 pm, we do not want to miss this opportunity to kick some more Big Oil ass.  Our Occupy Spokane allies are enthusiastically taking to the streets, calling for our camaraderie, and even offering sleeping space in their clubhouse! Continue reading →

Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists are carpooling to a Sunday, April 15, demonstration at Jon Dam Plaza in Richland, Washington, organized by Occupy Portland and called A15 Hanford Rally: North America’s Fukushima?  At this event between noon and 5 pm, participants will express their dismay with the failure and corruption of clean-up efforts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear waste site with nine decommissioned weapons-production reactors, as well as their concerns about the safety and health of facilities contractors and workers and resident Native Americans and downwinders in the Tri-Cities and surrounding region, whose lives has been decimated by Hanford.  Occupy Portland and local protesters plan to heighten the American priority, increase the funding, transparency, and efficiency, and spur the external oversight of the Hanford clean-up, while uniting the people and communities affected by the Hanford situation.  To learn more about this massive, nationally supported rally, featuring speakers such as Dr. Helen Caldicott, John Brave Hawk, Paul Gunter, and Paige Knight, and about the millions of gallons of radioactive waste leaking from underground storage tanks at the most contaminated high earthquake risk zone in North America, visit the event facebook page or website.

Ever vigilant of the root causes of climate change, Wild Idaho Rising Tide organizers are networking throughout the region to raise awareness and instigate protests against ongoing Alberta tar sands transportation ventures originating at the Ports of Pasco and Vancouver in Washington.  During the Hanford rally, we plan to talk with plenty of local activists opposed to dirty energy projects and, at 5 pm after the demonstration, travel with them five miles north to the Port of Pasco to protest ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil megaload traffic across our region.  Approximately 100 tar sands modules remain at the port, where we will converge with signs, banners, musical instruments, and voices, to exert pressure on oil companies considering and/or currently staging transport of their deadly construction components to escalating Alberta tar sands operations.  As radioactive waste poisons the Earth and its waters and greenhouse gases cloud the skies and scramble the planet’s climate, take a stand with us in Richland and Pasco: it is our responsibility to halt and remedy our collective industrial energy bad habits.  Meet your WIRT comrades and Moscow community members on the south, Troy Highway side of the Eastside Marketplace parking lot at 9 am on Sunday, April 15, to drive or ride to the Tri-Cities and return by 9 pm that evening.

On Tuesday, March 6, the last two of over 70 components of a Canadian tar sands upgrader will cross Highway 95 and Moscow en route to Montana and Alberta.  The community of life on this planet needs our full participation tonight as we together raise our voices and impose our bodies against ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil’s dirty energy and its dire ecological and climate consequences.  Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) members and regional activists will launch our final, local, anti-megaload actions in downtown Moscow starting at 9:30 pm PST, to celebrate Big Oil’s departure from the Port of Lewiston and north central Idaho and to further expose its degradation of the boreal forest, First Nations’ health, and our global climate.  After our successful civil disobedience blockade on Sunday by Cass Davis, Jeanne McHale, Pat Monger, and Jim Prall, corporate oppression at the hands of state, county, and city police, pilot vehicle drivers, and flaggers will likely tighten security around its single-file Moscow convoy and staggered transports on the rest of its Idaho route. Continue reading →

If you could choose only a few nights to oppose the brutal expansion of the largest industrial project on Earth, Alberta tar sands exploitation, Sunday, March Fourth! and possibly another evening this week offer your best chances!  Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists and Moscow community members plan to fully exercise our First Amendment rights of free speech and public assembly on Sunday and as the last five twice-postponed megaloads of over 70 upgrader plant parts rampage Highway 95 this week.  These demonstrations present some of your last local opportunities to express your outrage with ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil’s corporate malfeasance with tar sands transportation and production projects: be there or miss the action! Continue reading →

[Update: Wild Northern Rockies winter weather and other adverse conditions have reportedly forced ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil to postpone passage of its three Tuesday megaloads until Wednesday, February 22.  For further logistical information, please see the following revised request for protester and monitor involvement.]

With only a few of the 78 split-megaloads remaining at the Port of Lewiston, citizens outraged by corporate takeover of our public resources and senseless exacerbation of ecological destruction, Native genocide, and climate chaos NEED YOU in the Moscow streets on Wednesday night, February 22, to remind ExxonMobil’s Canadian subsidiary Imperial Oil how forever unwelcome it is in north central Idaho.  Between the four Highway 12 court cases and about 40 Highway 95 protests in Moscow and Potlatch, we are kicking Big Oil’s tar sands equipment off the taxpayer-funded highways it has conspicuously damaged with over 70 massive loads, as we expand megaload opposition to Spokane and Interstate 90 (see Highway 95 Megaload Tire Marks south of Plummer, Idaho 2-17-12). Continue reading →

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Moscow area and Highway 95 corridor residents oppose the relentless, nefarious parade of corporate power and climate chaos that ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil tar sands equipment represents.  With only three more opportunities to express your outrage, please join regional citizens and Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists on Wednesday, February 15, to protest and monitor these transports.

If weather does not impede their plans, shipment hauler Mammoet, along with Idaho state troopers, Moscow city police, flaggers, and pilot vehicle drivers, intend to escort three megaload parts of a tar sands processing plant separately from the Port of Lewiston after 8 pm on Wednesday, until they reach Moscow, where a single convoy will cross town and later disperse. Continue reading →

We are eager to hit the still wild Idaho streets with our courageous comrades on Thursday evening, February 9, as the dark curtain of climate change dangles over the remaining 11 Imperial Oil tar sands shipments.  Apparent in the hundreds of protesters who, in the path of this industrial invasion, have laid down, sat, stood, walked, marched, biked, chanted, sang, played instruments, made and waved banners, signs, and props, witnessed, monitored, photographed, recorded, videotaped, wrote, broadcast, testified, got arrested, charged, sentenced, and tried, and generally raged against the machines of industry and excess, we are a daunting force of collective objection to all that is wrong with America’s dirty energy secret, Alberta bitumen exploitation.

But don’t drop your protest signs and sit down yet, Moscow (except in the path of a megaload!).  Three more processing plant modules are struggling up Highway 95 and Interstate 90 from the Port of Lewiston after 8 pm on Thursday.  Before these last corporate parades leave Idaho, the world is watching and we are wondering how we will celebrate not only their looming absence but also our victories, as residents of a dozen small Idaho towns along two rural routes have shown huge multinational corporations the door to different routes around our homes and wildlands. Continue reading →

On Tuesday evening, February 7, three of the remaining 14 ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil megaloads at the Port of Lewiston are heading up Highway 95, together weighing almost 900,000 pounds and stretching 570 feet or about four blocks long.  If weather does not again complicate the transport of these tar sands processing modules, the 15-feet tall, 22- to 24-feet wide rolling roadblocks, escorted by pilot vehicle drivers and Idaho troopers and scrutinized by citizen monitors, will travel separately except through Moscow, where a single convoy will encounter flaggers, city police, and protesters.  Mammoet will haul the 200,000-pound, 175-feet long megaload on a conventional trailer to the Wallace snow graveyard west of Lookout Pass.  The other two behemoths, respectively 195 feet and 360,000 pounds and 200 feet and 335,000 pounds, will move on hydraulic trailers to a parking/staging area between Worley and the Coeur d’Alene casino, where vigilant community members have observed two or three guards stationed at all times. Continue reading →