Opening of the U.S. Highway 95 Reroute Discussion
Part 1 of the U.S. Highway 95 Reroute Discussion
Part 2 of the U.S. Highway 95 Reroute Discussion
(Also see Tim Hatten’s presentation slides: posted soon)
Part 3 of the U.S. Highway 95 Reroute Discussion
In early January 2013, the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) released its U.S. 95 Thorncreek Road to Moscow draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) and technical reports on three alternatives for proposed realignment of the dangerously accident-prone 6.5-mile stretch of Highway 95 just south of Moscow. Its preferred E-2 alternative mirrors 10A of the 2002 ITD environmental assessment that the Paradise Ridge Defense Coalition and its allies successfully challenged, secured a federal injunction, and forced ITD to complete the current DEIS review process. The purportedly shorter and safer E-2 eastern route would climb 400 to 500 feet up the western, exposed shoulder of scenic Paradise Ridge, while compromising weather-related highway traveler safety, area aesthetics and noise levels, wetland preservation, and protection of rare remnants of native Palouse Prairie habitat and wildlife. It would also inflict the greatest detrimental effects on pine stands, ungulate conservation and collisions, endangered species, and ecosystem restoration, as it imposes more stream tributary crossings, impervious surfaces, pollution runoff, and weed infestations. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the Idaho Department of Fish and Game have strongly recommended against this eastern Highway 95 corridor, likely advanced by ITD to accommodate international industrial traffic like tar sands megaloads.
The Paradise Ridge Defense Coalition, Palouse Environmental Sustainability Coalition, and concerned Moscow area citizens and groups welcomed public involvement and discussion at the Highway 95 Forum and Field Trip, a knowledge-sharing session in the 1912 Center Great Room in Moscow, followed by E-2 realignment site visits on Saturday, January 19, 2013. Between noon and 2 pm, community members Al Poplawsky, Cass Davis, Tim Hatten, and Brett Haverstick summarized the DEIS, presented arguments in opposition to the eastern alternative, and opened the informational meeting to questions and insights. From 2 until 5 pm, event organizers and participants carpooled and staged a field trip to locations along and near the proposed eastern Highway 95 route described in the DEIS. Several Paradise Ridge residents hosted pertinent site explorations and talks off Eid and Paradise Ridge roads in the sunny, early evening light. For further information about the Highway 95 Forum and Field Trip, see the event descriptions on facebook and on the Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) website. Ongoing issue updates, articles, and interviews appear in the Highway 95 Re-Route section of the WIRT website.
On November 26, the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) approved a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) and technical reports on three alternatives for proposed realignment of U.S. Highway 95 between Thorn Creek Road and Moscow. It published the DEIS in early January 2013 and scheduled a public information/comment hearing between 2 and 8:30 pm on Wednesday, January 23, at the Best Western University Inn, 1516 Pullman Road in Moscow, and a public comment period ending on February 23. Of the three DEIS alternatives of 11 options considered by ITD – an eastern route climbing the western shoulder of scenic Paradise Ridge (E2), a central corridor realigning the middle section of the present 6.5-mile stretch of road (C3), and a western, longer route veering close to Washington (W4) – the ITD-preferred eastern alternative shifts the highway up 400 to 500 feet in elevation and 2,000 feet east, between the Primeland Cooperative grain elevators south of Moscow and the top of Reisenauer Hill.
This E2 route in the recently released DEIS mirrors alternative 10A in a previous environmental assessment (EA) of Highway 95 re-construction plans. That 2002 version provoked regional citizen concerns for climate-related highway traveler safety, urban sprawl, area aesthetics, wetland preservation, and protection of rare remnants of native Palouse Prairie habitat and wildlife. The Paradise Ridge Defense Coalition (PRDC) emerged and, along with the Palouse Group of the Sierra Club and the Idaho Conservation League, successfully challenged the EA, secured a 2003 injunction from U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill, and forced ITD to complete the current DEIS review process mandated for all federal highway redesign projects that widen or re-route roadbeds.
A reactivated group of prior and new PRDC members have identified many potential environmental, economic, and social consequences of the purportedly shorter, faster, and safer eastern realignment of Highway 95. Besides the same ongoing objections, they note that the DEIS E2 alternative would impose the greatest detrimental effects on pine stands, ungulate (deer, moose) conservation and collisions, endangered species, and ecosystem restoration. It would also create more stream tributary crossings, impervious surfaces, and pollution runoff and challenge flood control. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the Idaho Department of Fish and Game have strongly recommended against this eastern Highway 95 corridor, likely advanced by ITD to accommodate international industrial traffic like tar sands megaloads. Continue reading
In early May 2012, police arrested 13 concerned British Colombia residents along with scientists, when they blocked four Wyoming coal export trains (350.org photo).
As the environmental impact statement (EIS) scoping period for the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point, Washington, draws to a close on January 21, and public comments on the Coyote Island Terminal in Boardman, Oregon, are long past due, federal, state, and county decision makers never provided public hearings in Idaho and Montana or a mine-to-port regional programmatic environmental analysis. Nonetheless, residents of the comparatively rural inland Northwest, especially near Powder River Basin coal strip mines and train routes through Montana population centers and along the railroad funnel between Sandpoint, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington, will bear most of the adverse risks and consequences of domestic coal export to Asia, while Ambre Energy, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, SSA Marine, and other giant coal companies reap billions of dollars in profit on up to 160 million tons of coal per year, at taxpayers’ expense.
Pillaged public investments would support the required infrastructure and mitigate the predictable damages of this corporate onslaught. Each of the 40 to 60 additional coal trains per day, 1.5 miles long with their 125 cars, would spew toxic coal dust, diesel fumes, occasionally derailed loads, and incessant noise, disrupt local transportation, businesses, emergency responses, and economies, and degrade air and water quality, human and wildlife health, property values, and regional identity. Five proposed West Coast and Columbia River terminals with huge, open-air coal heaps, river barges through endangered species critical habitat, and over 950 immense, ocean-going, coal ships per year, crowding oil tankers through the tangled Salish Sea to Asian markets for combustion, would further compromise aquatic ecosystems and inhabitants and significantly exacerbate pollution and global climate change.
Between January 11 and 20, 2013, Blue Skies Campaign, Occupy Spokane, and Wild Idaho Rising Tide are staging four or more coal export solidarity actions at train track/roadside intersections in Moscow and Sandpoint, Idaho, Missoula and other cities across Montana, and Spokane, Washington. But we need your help to powerfully demonstrate our collective regional resistance to coal export schemes perpetrated by industry and government. Tell the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Surface Transportation Board, state and county regulatory agencies, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, not to mention the world’s largest private coal companies, that Northwesterners will not tolerate their dismissal of community concerns and environmental wellbeing so apparent in their purported public participation processes and mercenary ventures. Continue reading
URGENT ALERT: We just received notice (at 6:30 pm!) from the Idaho Transportation Department that Mullen Trucking is moving a megaload on Highway 12 tonight (Thursday, January 3). Please see the following, previous description and meet at 9 pm at the corner of Second and Washington Streets in Moscow to monitor and protest this likely Alberta-bound shipment! Call 208-301-8039 for carpool arrangements to Lewiston…
Displaying its usual disregard for traveler safety over a holiday weekend and dangerous winter weather conditions, the Idaho Transportation Department has issued yet another permit for an oversized shipment on U.S. Highway 12 on Thursday night, January 3. A 163-foot-long truck will transport a generator skid from the Port of Lewiston across Idaho to the Montana border and likely to Alberta between 10 pm on Thursday and 5:30 am on Friday. The almost 17-foot tall, 243,000-pound shipment will crowd tight road curves and narrow two lanes with its 15 foot width, and will delay traffic on U.S. Highway 95 as it travels in the wrong direction near the Spalding bridge. Continue reading
On Wednesday, November 28, performer and environmental educator Dana Lyons brought his Great Coal Train Tour to Pullman, Washington, and offered a free afternoon community organizing workshop and a live evening concert at Washington State University (WSU). Singer and guitarist Dana Lyons hails from Bellingham, Washington – ground-zero of Northwest resistance to coal exports, near the largest proposed coal port facility in North America. Best known for his comedy hit song Cows with Guns, Dana has recorded eight albums during his lifetime artistic career and worked around the Earth to raise awareness, activism, and funds for environmental and social justice issues. During his 40-plus-show tour, Dana has visited dozens of communities throughout four Northwestern states, from Billings to Bellingham and from Portland to Coos Bay, along the route of proposed coal export trains that could carry 160 million tons of coal per year from Montana and Wyoming to the Columbia River and West Coast and via supertanker to China. He has networked with local residents and organizers across the region, who are working to stop potential coal mines, trains, and ports for health, safety, traffic, economic, and environmental reasons. Hosted by the WSU Environmental Task Force and Environmental Science Club student groups, Dana’s fun, inspiring, and family-oriented Pullman concert intermingled with place-based storytelling catalyzed community interest and engagement in this significant regional issue among the 30 audience members. For more information about Northwest coal exports, see CoalTrainFacts.org, PowerPastCoal.org, Coal-Free-Bellingham.org, and WildIdahoRisingTide.org. Visit Dana’s website to explore his music, videos, merchandise, and tour schedule at CowsWithGuns.com and listen to his coal train song, Sometimes.
If volatile, climate changed weather does not mercifully impede passage to Alberta tar sands operations, two more Sunshine Oilsands wastewater evaporators could traverse U.S. Highway 12 between 10 pm and 5:30 am next Monday and Tuesday night, December 3 and 4. The Idaho Transportation Department in Boise issued permits on Friday afternoon, November 30, allowing Omega Morgan to haul both over-legal equipment shipments weighing 80,000 pounds and measuring up to 53 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 21 feet tall. Moving at close to normal speeds, each eastbound megaload could cross Idaho separately in one night, from the Port of Wilma in Clarkston, Washington, along Idaho Route 128 and Highway 12, to Lolo Pass on the Montana border. Three flagging teams and pilot vehicles and two trucks with portable signs (but no ambulance) will travel with each module and escort traffic around the convoy at pre-identified pull-offs, as required by the Omega Morgan transportation plan that limits traffic delays to less than 15 minutes. Continue reading
In conjunction with grassroots climate justice and tar sands co-activists from Canada, the Northeast, Texas, and Utah, near ruptured pipelines and oil spills, and across the continent, regional Wild Idaho Rising Tide members gathered at 5 pm on Monday, November 19, near the Moscow, Idaho, City Hall, for a Climate Change Resistance Solidarity Action. To recognize and support Tar Sands Blockade’s Mass Action in East Texas on Monday, blocking TransCanada construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, 350.org’s march around the White House and rally in Washington DC on Sunday, again denouncing Obama administration backing of the Keystone XL, and over 40 worldwide climate solidarity actions, a handful of stalwart tar sands megaload protesters wore WIRT T-shirts and hoisted the organizational banner and protest signs to compose solidarity photos posted and shared with courageous comrades in the Texas trees and numerous anti-tar sands allies. The rapid reunion demonstrated the participants’ ongoing resistance of tar sands and fossil fuel exploitation by oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and TransCanada that are expanding Alberta tar sands mining operations on indigenous lands and associated production and transportation facilities throughout the U.S. Compelled by the aftershock of Hurricane Sandy, Midwestern crop failures, Western wildfires, the hottest year on record, aggressive corporate development of dirty energy, and presidential campaign silence on urgent climate change issues, American citizens and disproportionately impacted victims of extreme weather disasters and pollution are collectively and increasingly demanding climate crisis resolutions through unconventional methods.
On Saturday, November 17, between noon and 4 pm, two dozen activists from Occupy Spokane and Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) converged in several high vehicle and pedestrian traffic areas in Sandpoint, Idaho, with a people’s train of “rail car” protest signs, sidewalk parades, and chants. Rebuking schemes for five coal export facilities on the Columbia River and Washington and Oregon coasts and increased toxic coal train traffic from Montana and Wyoming across the Northwest, demonstrators distributed coal issue flyers and door hangers, encouraged northern Idaho participation in December 4 scoping hearings in Boardman, Oregon, and Spokane, Washington, on proposed Coyote Island and Cherry Point coal terminals, and mobilized a network of activists for direct actions at the hearings and in the field before respective December 12 and January 21 public comment deadlines. As federal, state, and county decision makers and industry perpetrators of pollution and climate change discount the concerns of communities most adversely affected by potential coal export train traffic through eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana, by staging distant opportunities for purported public input, anti-coal organizers are demanding rescheduling of the overlapping hearings, a mine-to-port programmatic environmental impact study and statement for all coal export proposals, and hearings in Idaho and Montana to expand the current exclusionary scoping process.
Since spring 2010, frontline Northwest activists have been resisting tar sands transportation projects and associated police states in our communities and on our roads, through six court cases, a dozen arrests, and over 50 direct actions. Residents of Moscow and Lewiston, Idaho, Spokane, Washington, Missoula, Montana, and regional rural enclaves have defended our wild places, home towns, and public roadways from the climate-wrecking, industrial ravages of “megaload” equipment transported for ExxonMobil, Weyerhaeuser, and other undisclosed corporations to Alberta destinations and tar sands operations. Our monitoring, protesting, and litigating activities have challenged, stalled, diverted, blockaded, frustrated, cost millions, and forced some of the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful dirty energy purveyors on Earth to boost their security, pay our state, county, and city police officers as escorts, guard their unoccupied stopover and port spaces, dismantle their supposedly irreducible loads, and sneak around us on alternative routes. Strategically considering and creatively implementing group trainings, rallies, testimonies, demonstrations, concerts, presentations, sit-ins, videos, photos, critical mass walks and bike rides, marches, street theater, fundraisers, and banner drops, we will not stop resisting until corporate interlopers stop rampaging our planet.
Tar sands module convoys encountered monitors and protests with every passage up Highway 95 through Moscow, Idaho, between July 2011 and March 2012, and similar pushback in Spokane, Washington, in May and June 2012. During the last week of October 2012, a 236-foot-long, 520,000-pound wastewater evaporator accomplished the first successful transit to the Alberta tar sands, through our narrow, sinuous, and steep Highway 12 wild and scenic river corridor across the largest wildlands complex in the lower 48 states. As first fracking in Idaho looms to the south and coal export trains impend in the north, two smaller tar sands transports – with potentially thousands on the outsourced Asian production horizon – will attempt the same rugged route in early December, but not without our vigilant confrontations and their predictable accidents, injuries, and anguish imposed on people and property, collisions with vehicles, power lines, cliffs, and trees, delays of heart attack victims, emergency services, and holiday traffic, and degradation of our shared infrastructure and civil liberties, indigenous rights and northern boreal ecosystems, and atmospheric integrity. Continue reading
Wild Idaho Rising Tide 