Highway 95’s Largest OmegaLoad MoreAgain

Posted on November 8, 2013 by WIRT

The General Electric subsidiary Resources Conservation Company International evaporator core at the Port of Wilma on Friday, November 8, prepared for Omega Morgan transport to the Athabasca Oil Corporation’s Hangingstone in situ Alberta tar sands mining operations southwest of Fort McMurray (Rob Briggs photo)

On Friday, November 8, the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) issued a permit for the heaviest and longest megaload of tar sands extraction equipment to recently traverse U.S. Highway 95 and Interstate 90 in Idaho and degrade Idahoans’ roads and rights on Sunday and Monday nights, November 10 and 11, between 10 pm to 6 am [1]. Like the controversial oversize evaporator that met four nights of fierce resistance from Nez Perce, Idle No More, Wild Idaho Rising Tide, and allied activists in early August, this core of a similar shipment that also arrived at the Port of Wilma on July 22 weighs up to 644,000 pounds [2]. But unlike that 255-foot-long transport, this behemoth stretches 297 feet long. Its 16-foot width crowds out other traffic on mostly two-lane Highway 95, while its 15.9-foot height barely clears standard 16-foot-tall overpasses along the Idaho route. Hillsboro, Oregon-based Omega Morgan will haul the partial evaporator, designed by General Electric subsidiary Resources Conservation Company International (RCCI) of Bellevue, Washington, and manufactured in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, on a specialized trailer conveyed by push and pull trucks. Accompanied by a convoy of pilot cars, flaggers, and likely police vehicles, the inexplicably divisible and unstranded evaporator will travel from the Port of Wilma in Clarkston, Washington, on Idaho Highway 128 to Lewiston, north on U.S. 95 to Coeur d’Alene, and then east on Interstate 90 to the Montana border, over the course of two nights. En route to the Hangingstone steam assisted gravity drainage tar sands mining operations of Athabasca Oil Corporation, southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the corporate parade must safely pull over at previously identified locations in Idaho, to clear traffic “delayed” (fully stopped) no longer than 15 minutes under state laws. Continue reading →

Interview with Nez Perce Woman Who Temporarily Halted Load Almost Big Enough to Qualify as Megaload on Reservation

Posted on October 22, 2013 by WIRT

Liquid full absorber on Highway 12 through Kamiah

Nez Perce tribal activist Judy Oatman talks about her solo vehicle blockade of an oversized, Vietnam-made liquid full absorber traveling on Highway 12 during daylight hours on Monday, October 21, through an interview between 9:32 and 2:16 of the Tuesday, October 22, KRFP Radio Free Moscow Evening Report, Big Load on Res.

WIRT Scouting the Port of Wilma 10-20-13

Posted on October 20, 2013 by WIRT

On Sunday afternoon, October 20, three Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists drove by the Port of Wilma, across the Snake River from Clarkston, Washington, where megaload hauler Omega Morgan has leased and secured a yard and warehouse, to store, disassemble, and stage evaporators transported whole up Highway 12 or in pieces up Highway 95 to Alberta tar sands steam assisted gravity drainage mining operations.

(WIRT video)

Vietnam-Made Liquid Full Absorber 10-20&21-13

Posted on October 20, 2013 by WIRT

On Sunday afternoon, October 20, on the way to scout the Port of Wilma, three Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists spotted a megaload with an oversized load banner and Alberta license plates (4MMO-31). The liquid full absorber manufactured by Doosan Heavy Industries Vietnam, on Trail King trailers licensed in Alberta and provided by R & D Trailer Rentals, parked facing downhill (southbound) at the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) weigh station on the top of the Highway 95 Lewiston grade. The cylindrical module, used to process natural gas or other fossil fuels, measures 15.38 feet wide, 14.64 feet high, and 38.71 to 49.21 feet long, with a gross weight of 64,174 pounds. WIRT documented the equipment specifications with videos and photos.

Nez Perce tribal activists Alicia and Mary Jane Oatman were traveling west on U.S. Highway 12 near Greer, during daylight hours on Monday, October 21, when they saw this oversized load with Alberta license plates speeding east with two pilot cars, wide enough to take up a lane and a half. As soon as they reached a cell phone service area, they called their mother, Judy Oatman, to ask if she could videotape the mini-megaload’s passage and get its permit information. Judy confronted the Canada-bound transport by staging a perpendicular, solo vehicle blockade, to briefly stop the Vietnam-made absorber crossing her mother’s land. She questioned the transport crew and put them on notice that they were trespassing illegally through Nez Perce lands. They drove around her truck, probably called the cops, and proceeded through Kamiah and over the Clearwater River bridge. Judy took two separate videos with good footage and continued monitoring the sneaky big corporations’ obviously dangerous load, as it probably headed to Alberta to refine natural gas used to extract and process tar sands.

Without news of this shipment in the regional papers, and allies awaiting the results of their gracious Highway 95 public records request, no one knew what the load was (a natural gas dehydrator?), where it came from (across Washington from the coast or rivers?), and where it was going in Canada. Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) sent out a media release to motivate press communication with various state agencies, in an effort to belatedly reveal the truth of the situation on Tuesday. A media source contacted Lonnie Richardson of the Idaho State Police, who said that this big load (and similar ones to come) traveled Highway 12 to the Gifford Reubens Road to Highway 95, bypassing a defunct railroad trestle near Lapwai and heading south toward Grangeville. This natural gas processor could have moved southward toward the soon-to-be-fracked Payette County oil and gas field. But our trustworthy Nez Perce allies saw the load move through Kamiah. Dennis Bernstein of the nationally broadcast radio show Flashpoints called WIRT, in response to our October 21 press release, but we told him that we still did not have enough information about this fiasco. KRFP Radio Free Moscow covered the incident on its Monday evening report, and Judy called and interviewed for KRFP’s Tuesday evening news program.

The Idaho Transportation Department stated that the module was an “excessive load,” not considered a “megaload.” The agency provided no public notice of this transport except a returned phone call from Doral Hoff of the ITD Lewiston office, who confirmed that the megaload traveled on Highway 12 to Montana and Canada during daylight hours on Monday, October 21. For a few days, WIRT and tribal allies remained unsure whether this absorber went up Highway 13 to Highway 95 and south to Payette County gas fields or up Highway 12 to Montana and Alberta. On Wednesday, October 23, Adam Rush of the Boise ITD office verified that the mini-megaload arrived at the Montana border, via Highway 12, at 3:30 pm PDT on that Monday. He also described a typical three-step process of public notification about this transport that was inexplicably rushed and unaccomplished in this instance. Unimpeded by Judge Winmill’s preliminary injunction and the subsequent Forest Service closure order prohibiting Highway 12 passage of only Omega Morgan megaloads larger than 16 feet wide and 150 feet long, this hauling company and ITD blatantly disregarded the regional tar sands/megaload resistance community. This situation and the October 15-16 dismantled evaporator transports through Moscow on Highway 95 prove that ITD will sneak Omega Morgan and other companies’ oversized shipments up both Highways 12 and 95.

Vietnam-Made Liquid Full Absorber 10-20-13 (October 20 Wild Idaho Rising Tide videos)

Nez Perce Briefly Block Oversize Load Nearly Big Enough to Trigger Judicial Review (October 21 KRFP Evening Report)

Interview with Nez Perce Woman Who Temporarily Halted Load Almost Big Enough to Qualify as Megaload on Reservation (October 22 KRFP Evening Report)

(All photos except the Kamiah photo provided by Wild Idaho Rising Tide)

Continue reading →

Vietnam-Made Liquid Full Absorber 10-20-13

Posted on October 20, 2013 by WIRT

General Electric Apparently Splitting Stranded Tar Sands Evaporator to Send Parts up U.S. 95

Posted on October 16, 2013 by WIRT

Likely General Electric tar sands wastewater evaporator travels through Moscow on October 15 (David Hall photo).

Descriptions of the apparently disassembled tar sands wastewater evaporator, stranded by a Highway 12 megaload lawsuit, accompany live Moscow protest recordings and contextual commentary, between 12:48 and 5:46 of the Wednesday, October 16, KRFP Radio Free Moscow Evening Report, Megaload Likely Evaporator.

No Tar Sands Megaloads Anywhere!

Posted on October 15, 2013 by WIRT

With a mid-afternoon media release, the Idaho Transportation Department confirmed that likely Alberta tar sands equipment shipments with unknown ultimate destinations will travel through the Highway 12 sacrifice zone: northbound on U.S. Highway 95 between Lewiston and Coeur d’Alene and eastbound on Interstate 90, starting on Tuesday night, October 15. Omega Morgan is hauling four sump sections in two pairs from the Port of Wilma in Clarkston, Washington, embarking on Idaho Highway 128 at 9:30 pm and 10:30 pm, and reaching the Idaho/Montana state line at 5 am and 6 am on Wednesday morning. Each oversized cylinder measures over 20 feet wide, 15 feet tall, 75 feet long, and weighs under 80,000 pounds. Due to the width of these modules, three flagging teams, two pilot vehicles, and portable signs will travel with each pair of transports that cannot legally delay other vehicles for more than 15 minutes and must pull over to let such traffic pass. State and city officials have advised that these ‘mini-megaloads’ are not pieces of the 21-foot-wide, 255-foot-long, 644,000-pound evaporator currently stranded at the Port of Wilma, with plans to cross U.S. Highway 12 scuttled by Nez Perce and allied protests and federal Judge B. Lynn Winmill’s preliminary injunction. Resources Conservation Company International (RCCI) has filed an appeal of this decision with the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) members and regional activists are coordinating local, anti-megaload actions in downtown Moscow starting at 8:30 pm, to confront Big Oil’s return to Moscow streets and Highway 95 in north central Idaho. We will continue to defend the community of life and climate of Earth with our full participation tonight, as we together raise our voices and impose our bodies against General Electric, RCCI, and Omega Morgan. The ecological, human, and global climate consequences of their dirty energy mining degradation of the boreal forests and peat bogs in First Nations homelands are too dire to not act against this transportation venture. We encourage everyone to bring your friends, family, signs, banners, and musical instruments, and if so moved, practice civil disobedience and initiate blockades to counter corporate oppression and bolster our regional resistance. Please join WIRT activists at the corner of Second and Washington streets, near Moscow City Hall, at 8:30 pm and beyond, to monitor the megaloads south of Moscow and/or to replace and create megaload protest signs lost on Highway 12, before convoys enter Moscow at approximately 10:30 pm. We heartily welcome your spontaneous expressions of anti-tar sands passion and force on every Northwest/Northern Rockies megaload route!

Fall 2013 Moscow Megaload Protests

Posted on October 15, 2013 by WIRT

Barging in Alberta tar sands facilities components, despite court/street resistance, dissembling them, and sneaking them up Highway 95 are apparently becoming standard, default, corporate operating procedure. General Electric subsidiary Resources Conservation Company International (RCCI) has been hiding and taking apart such megaloads in a leased Port of Wilma warehouse. Omega Morgan, Morgan Machinery, and their state police and transportation department facilitators slipped four legal weight “sump sections” up Highway 95 and through Moscow on the night of October 15-16. Adam Rush of the Idaho Transportation Department said that these smaller, lighter transports are “different from the piece of equipment that is still at the Port of Wilma,” probably only because they were no longer attached to it.

No one blockaded the first two suddenly apparent pieces of the controversial RCCI evaporator that passed the too-familiar Third and Washington Street protest haunt in downtown Moscow at 11 pm on Tuesday. The vertical cylinders appeared to be the larger-diameter, outer layers of the second, plastic-wrapped evaporator that arrived at the port on July 22 with the similar megaload that encountered early-August Nez Perce and allied resistance on Highway 12. Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) activists noticed Moscow city police looking out their nearby back door several times and even walking across the street from them, while city, county, and state police vehicles drove by numerous times, all watching and perhaps waiting for protesters to leave, after the first two RCCI loads traversed the city. At 2 am, haulers snuck the last pair of megaloads past Moscow area residents, after they dispersed at 1:30 am.

Like permitting protocol for the 33 overlegal ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil tar sands processing components that also sought Highway 12 passage but were court-blocked and not as secretly down-sized by mostly out-of-state workers to approximately 70 half-height Highway 95 modules during 2011-12, RCCI also certified to the Idaho Transportation Department that it could not reduce the size of its steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) mining evaporators and thus must transport them through the overpass-free Nez Perce Reservation and wild public lands and rivers around Highway 12. It revealed its lies when Omega Morgan and Morgan Machinery moved pieces of the court-stranded evaporator through Moscow on Tuesday evening, October 15. Heavy hauler Mammoet similarly tried to sneak Imperial Oil behemoths weighing up to 415,000 pounds past Moscow area protesters and monitors.

Are the widths of the remaining parts of the huge second evaporator, seen outside the port warehouse on October 14 and 15, narrow enough to not require oversize permits and public notice and thus traverse Highways 95 or 12 unnoticed? Their schematics originally submitted to the Idaho Transportation Department imply otherwise. Expect resistance soon to more oversize loads that will compromise Highway 95 night-time safety, indigenous lands, waters, and people in Alberta, and the global climate! Moscow and Wild Idaho Rising Tide are fortunate to exercise our responsibility as gatekeepers to Alberta tar sands hell! People across the Northwest should obstruct every such route on rivers and roads leading north!

No Tar Sands Megaloads Anywhere! (October 15 Wild Idaho Rising Tide)

Four Oversized Loads to Travel Tonight on U.S. Highway 95 (October 15 Lewiston Tribune)

Megaloads Return to Moscow Streets Tonight (October 15 KRFP Evening Report)

General Electric Apparently Splitting Stranded Tar Sands Evaporator to Send Parts up U.S. 95 (October 16 KRFP Evening Report)

Mini-Megaloads Head for Montana via U.S. Highway 95 (October 16 Lewiston Tribune)

Megaloads Draw Protesters (October 17 Moscow-Pullman Daily News)

WIRT Scouting the Port of Wilma 10-20-13 (October 20 Wild Idaho Rising Tide video)

Omega Morgan/Morgan Machinery Highway 95 Sump Section Superload Applications & Traffic Plan 10-15-13 (Idaho Transportation Department)

Evaporator at the Port of Wilma 10-14-13 (Wild Idaho Rising Tide photo)

Evaporator at the Port of Wilma 1 pm 10-15-13 (Wild Idaho Rising Tide photo)

Continue reading →

Idaho Global Frackdown 2

Posted on October 15, 2013 by WIRT

During the last two Idaho legislative sessions, a majority of our state senators and representatives succumbed to the mercenary ambitions of the oil and natural gas industry and the state of Idaho. They passed state laws, rules, and regulations allowing hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” that pollutes surface and ground water, sanctioning associated waste injection wells that leak or re-use water wells, permitting seismic testing and gas flaring that jeopardize geologic stability and air quality, granting corporate hegemony over local jurisdictions that undermines democratic oversight of oil and gas facilities, and consenting to drilling on state lands and near or under rivers, wetlands, and wildlife refuges that sustain drinking water, agriculture, and native species [1, 2].

Despite ongoing outcry from thousands of citizens and diligent input from scientists, attorneys, elected officials, and conservation organizations, our delegates have negligently accommodated oil and gas exploration, production, and transportation in Idaho, especially where the state owns the subsurface mineral rights, at the likely expense of their constituents’ health, safety, livelihoods, and self-governance. In the wake of increasingly erratic weather and horrific oil and gas spills in the flooded South Platte River bottomlands of Colorado, honest, hard-working Idahoans dread the impacts of similar probable scenarios on their families and communities, homes and businesses, and resources and recreation in the Payette River floodplains, where drilling resumed this summer, and in the wild, downstream Snake River canyons [3, 4]. Continue reading →

Longview Coal Export Protest and Hearing

Posted on September 30, 2013 by WIRT

Eastern Washington and northern Idaho activists are gathering in Spokane at noon on Tuesday, October 1, to carpool, coordinate, and participate in a public protest and scoping hearing in Pasco, Washington, about the Millennium Bulk Terminals proposal for coal export facilities in Longview, Washington. The Tri-Cities area, where a unit train derailed and 31 of its cars spilled six million pounds of coal on July 2, 2012, could experience up to 18 more coal trains rolling through these communities every day. The Longview coal port and accompanying train traffic would threaten the human, environmental, and climate health as well as the public safety and economic vitality of the region.

Do not miss your only other inland Northwest opportunity, after the September 25 Spokane rally and hearing, to speak out against coal exports from Longview! Please get an online lottery ticket to testify or share, wear red in opposition to coal, bring your friends, family, and protest signs, and voice your concerns on Tuesday about the broad coal export impacts that county, state, and federal agencies should consider in an upcoming draft environmental impact statement. The Pasco protest commences at 3 pm outside and before the doors to The Trac Center at 6600 Burden Boulevard open at 4 pm, with proposal information displays available until 8 pm. Citizens can offer oral comments between 5 and 8 pm either privately or publicly. Call 509-879-7470 or 208-301-8039 for carpool arrangements with Occupy Spokane, Wild Idaho Rising Tide, and other regional coal export resisters. For further issue and comment process information, see: Continue reading →

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