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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Blockades Stop Williams Co.’s Drilling for a Day |
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by oly and nyc imcistas
(No verified email address) |
11 Jul 2002
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Blockades Stop Williams Co.’s Drilling for a Day |
Blockades Stop William Co.’s Drilling for a Day Activists kicked off an eco-defense campaign by locking down to William’s Energy Co.’s pipeline drilling equipment, stopping all work on the project for most of the day. The natural gas pipeline threatens sensitive endangered species habitat in the Black Lake Wildlife Preserve and in the Capital Forest (outside of Olympia, Washington), and is opposed by a broad coalition of local residents and environmentalists. Permits were denied by the State and county but were overruled by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 30 to 40 activists arrived early in the morning to an empty worksite and unguarded drilling equipment, which they immediately locked their arms onto and hung banners from. Workers from Michel’s Horizontal Drilling Company based in Brownsville Wisconsin arrived an hour later yelling “Hey, what the fuck?” (Exact quote) down into the pit. Activists conversed with the workers for a while, who seemed pretty entertained with the whole scene. Some even danced to chants of "Will the pipeline be defeated -by the people by and by- Will Williams join Enron in the sly lord in the sky?" Thurston County Sheriffs arrived at the action an hour later, which lead to a standoff. After a few hours of stalling tactics, police reinforcements arrived and waded into the crowd and began making arrests. Independent media activists were the first to be targeted, and their videos were seized. After a few minutes of much confusion and panic, activists retreated into nearby woods and were chased by police who used scare tactics (screaming and yelling “You’d better run faster”) and who surprised activists by aggressively continuing to try to arrest those who were clearly leaving the scene of the action as they maneuvered through the forest. A news helicopter that they suspect was relaying information to law enforcement also followed activists. The police then began removing the lockdowns, which took a few hours, since local cops have very little experience dealing with this from of protest. After a bumbling and comical trial-and-error process the police finally figured out how the lockboxes were designed and removed the lockdowns, causing a great deal of pain to the activists who were being removed. Drilling was effectively stopped for the day (workers have not yet assembled the drill). There were a total of 9 arrests. A tree-sit exists in the area to help block the drilling, and was still up and running as of the time of the writing of this story. This is only one step of many in the ongoing community and eco-defense campaign by Cascade Defense Network to stop William Co.’s pipeline, sending the company the way of Enron while preserving local communities and wildlife refuges. For more information contact fightthepipeline (at) olynetwork.org also check out this article in The Olympian |
