Category Archives: News

Megaloads are Gone, but Moscow Activists Aren’t

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Helen Yost is a spokeswoman for the activist group Wild Idaho Rising Tide (The Lewiston Tribune/David Johnson photo).

Wild Idaho Rising Tide continues with its objective of being a climate change watchdog group.

The megaloads may be gone, but Wild Idaho Rising Tide – the activist group credited and blamed for forcing oil company infrastructure loads to circumvent this town – remains.

Spokeswoman Helen Yost confirmed Monday that WIRT has established a semi-secret headquarters here for the climate change watchdog organization.

“It’s sort of a headquarters and office as well,” Yost said. “We share the location with our members and folks in the community. But because there can be some backlash against climate activists like us, we aren’t necessarily making that (the address) available to the public.”

Local concerns about potential retaliation, however, didn’t stop Yost from speaking out about big-picture issues, including the state of American politics. Continue reading →

Local Anti-Megaloads Activist Travels to Tar Sands

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Local Anti-Megaloads Activist Travels to Tar Sands between 7:57 and 1:08 on the Thursday, August 9, KRFP Radio Free Moscow Evening Report, Tar Sands Healing Walk

Interview with Organizer of this Weekend’s Tar Sands Healing Walk

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Interview with Organizer of this Weekend’s Tar Sands Healing Walk between 14:02 and 4:18 on the Thursday, August 2, KRFP Radio Free Moscow Evening Report, Tar Sands Healing Walk

Transport Company Seeks Permission to Move Megaload on U.S. Highway 12

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A heavy equipment transport firm is seeking permission from the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) to ship a megaload through north central Idaho on U.S. Highway 12.

Omega Morgan wants to move a 610,250-pound water purification vessel — 300 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 22 feet tall — from the Port of Lewiston to the Montana border, then to northern Alberta, Canada, according to an ITD email on Monday.

The vessel is being constructed and is expected to move through Idaho late next summer.

The firm hasn’t indicated how many days the trip would take, or where the vessel is being built or who it’s being built for, according to the email. Continue reading →

Last Spokane Megaloads 6-3-12

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Sunday, June 3, marked the last transit of tar sands modules through Spokane and a rambunctious send-off by Wild Idaho and Spokane Rising Tide and Occupy Spokane activists.  At 7:30 pm in the Magic Lantern Theatre, about 35 concerned Spokane citizens converged to watch the incisive documentary Tipping Point: The Age of the Oil Sands and to discuss emerging local and continent-wide struggles around one of the most compelling environmental issues of our time: tar sands development near Fort McMurray, Alberta.  As we grew weary of uncertain and false ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil shipment finales but nonetheless plotted our last Spokane megaload protest for that night, our Port of Pasco scout informed us just before the public screening that more Big Oil behemoths were poised to rumble through Spokane streets.  At the movie showing and lively debate, we alerted attendees of their immediate opportunity to take action against the topic of the film.  Considering the last transports’ historical significance, Terry Hill of Occupy Spokane posted a facebook event simply and aptly titled “Megaloads, Sunday, June 3, 2012.”  Folks met at the Occupy Spokane Clubhouse at 11 pm before traveling to Third and Regal streets to tell ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil one more time, “not in our town.”

Even though convoy personnel had erected orange cones on the north/freeway side of East Third Avenue, to block our tactical parking on both sides of the street, we crowded the two lane stretch with our banner hanging from the pedestrian bridge and our bodies, protest signs, and vehicles lining the ruined road to America’s Mordor.  Mayhem ensued as one of the largest of three tar sands modules passed within inches of outstretched arms and signs and a support vehicle darted back and forth behind it to survey width clearances.  A city police officer across the street waved three passenger vehicles following the loads onward with a flashlight, when a stop sign-mimicking protest sign asserting “Stop Tar Sands” inadvertently halted them.  One of the demonstrators captured the convoy CB radio chatter with his video, Megaload Spokane 6/4/2012, documenting the (hopefully) last megaloads to challenge the Northwest, available here with a few Wild Idaho Rising Tide photos.  WIRT hosted Terry Hill of Occupy Spokane on our June 11 Climate Justice Forum radio program, talking about this final demonstration, other Spokane anti-megaload protests, and the Lilac City’s occupy movement and clubhouse.

KYRS Spokane Radio Interview of Justin Ellenbecker & Helen Yost

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Most significant to our Spokane anti-megaload agitation, news director Gavin Dahl of KYRS Thin Air Community Radio in Spokane invited Justin Ellenbecker of Occupy Spokane and Helen Yost of WIRT to talk on the Friday morning drive-time May 25 Local News entitled Amazon Responds To Activist Pressure: “Helen Yost from Wild Idaho Rising Tide joins us by phone to explain the opposition to Alberta tar sands megaload shipments.  350,000-pound loads of processing equipment have been trucked through Spokane under the cover of darkness.  Climate activists are speaking out.”  Within the interview between 8:56 and 22:35, this broadcast also includes KRFP Radio Free Moscow coverage of the August 25-26 Moscow megaload passage and protest.

Washington/Idaho Megaload Resistance

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[NOTE: This press release and accompanying photos garnered public exposure of our frontline tar sands activism through three media outlets.  On May 22, lead Rising Tide organizer Scott Parkin posted our description of Spokane protests against ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil’s tar sands construction/transportation invasion of the Northwest as Tar Sands Megaload Fight Moves West to Spokane on the Rising Tide North America website and in the online newsletter It’s Getting Hot in Here: Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement.  On the same day, when over 1000 visitors viewed their internet site, the Earth First! Newswire also ran our story about Occupy Spokane/WIRT’s May 20 demonstration.]

At about 11:30 pm on Sunday night, May 20, a dozen activists from Occupy Spokane and Wild Idaho Rising Tide converged in Spokane, Washington, to protest megaloads of oversized equipment bound for Alberta tar sands operations from the Port of Pasco.  ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil has been using Highway 395, Interstate 90, and city streets in Spokane and Spokane Valley since mid-October to transport road damaging shipments weighing up to 400,000 pounds and stretching over 200 feet long.  Diverted in Idaho from their originally intended Highway 12 route by court challenges and from their alternative Highway 95 path by Moscow area protests, these pieces of a tar sands/bitumen processing plant will expand Canadian carbon fuel extraction, American dependence on oil, and continental greenhouse gas emissions, while reaping hefty profits for one of the wealthiest corporations on Earth. Continue reading →

Wisdom, Not Hypocrisy

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Peter Adrian, Pullman

The Moscow-Pullman Daily News 5/16/12

Tucked in among the political endorsements on Thursday’s editorial page (May 10) was a tart bit of criticism from Frank Luzzo, accusing (it is presumed) the megaloads protesters and those who support them of hypocrisy.

I beg to differ.  It is not hypocrisy to realize that an energy extraction process which requires more energy input than it returns as output is unsustainable; that allowing one’s community to be used as a doormat for corporate profiteering is ultimately destructive to that community; that the growth-obsessed, consumption-driven economy in which we grew up has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe; that the extent of our benefit from the era of cheap oil should be the measure of our responsibility for leading the transition away from it; and that we, as a society, have been headed the wrong way, and it is time to change course.

That is not hypocrisy.  It is wisdom.

Spokane Climate Justice Protest against ExxonMobil’s Megaloads 5-6-12

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In recognition of International Stop the Tar Sands/Climate Impacts Day on Saturday, a group of about eight activists met near East Third Avenue in Spokane, Washington, on Sunday evening, May 6, to protest megaloads of oversized equipment bound for Alberta tar sands operations from the Port of Pasco.  ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil has been using Highway 395, Interstate 90, and city streets in Spokane and Spokane Valley since mid-October to transport road damaging shipments weighing up to 400,000 pounds and stretching over 200 feet long.  Diverted in Idaho from their originally intended Highway 12 route by court challenges and from their alternative Highway 95 path by Moscow area protests, these pieces of a tar sands/bitumen processing plant will expand Canadian carbon fuel extraction, American dependence on oil, and continental greenhouse gas emissions, while reaping exorbitant profits for one of the wealthiest corporations on Earth. Continue reading →

Megaloads Protester Turns to Forestry

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Megaloads protester Jim Prall has started planting a small forest in a hay field on the edge of Moscow (The Lewiston Tribune/David Johnson photo).

Veteran activist Jim Prall begins ambitious tree-planting project at Moscow

Two months after being jailed for going into the street to protest passage of oil company megaloads through town, Jim Prall said he’s making amends by planting a forest.

“I’ve never felt so good about being patriotic as I have this spring, planting these baby trees,” said Prall, 67.  “I feel like, well, it makes up for the trouble I’ve caused with the megaloads.”

More importantly, Prall said while extracting a bit of his tongue from cheek, converting his five-acre hay field to an urban forest will be a lasting reminder that natural resource extraction must be countered by restoration.

“It’s really an honor to be making this place appropriate for the 21st century by planting trees on the edge of Moscow.”

Prall was among the last three of 11 protesters arrested here during months-long demonstrations against oversize oil company infrastructure loads being trucked through town en route to tar sand fields in Canada.

More than 30 demonstrations ranged in size from around 300 people in the beginning down to a couple of dozen toward the end.  Prall, who was among those protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s, initially stayed away from the late-night megaload protests.

“It was past my bedtime,” he quipped. Continue reading →