Do you ever worry if your family will have access to clean drinking water tomorrow? If your mother or father’s final resting place will be bulldozed, excavated, and defiled? These hypothetical questions posed to you are the realities of the Standing Rock Sioux Native American Tribe right now. The Dakota Access Pipeline debate as to whether or not it should be relocated from the Sioux Native American reservation is presently taking place due to its construction being merely half of a mile downstream from protected sacred land. The Dakota Access Pipeline has already been relocated once before further south from Bismarck due to concerns that pipeline leaks would contaminate water sources (Dalrymple). This same fear of water contamination lies
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Trucks and railroads are said to be less safe, reliable, and present more infrastructure concerns. The pipeline would serve as a faster, more direct way to transport oil across the country, and would open up multiple new markets for the oil industry. These new market include the mid-west, east coast, and the gulf (Gross). While these points are valid, pipelines have proven themselves to generate more widespread destruction when malfunction occurs. Pipeline spills and ruptures occur regularly. For example, in 2010 Enbridge Energy pipeline spilled 843,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, resulting in one of the largest inland oil spills in United States history (Healy). The clean up lasted for years and cost over a billion dollars. Again in 2013 the Tesoro Logistics pipeline in North Dakota burst and released 20,000 gallons of oil onto a wheat field costing over $4 million in clean up costs (Sider). The infamous cancelled Keystone XL Pipeline is another pipeline project gone deeply wrong, as it was shut down due to environmental concerns (Healy). Overall, the switch from automobile and train transport to a pipeline does not have enough environmental or safety impact to usher in such a dramatic change when the price of a pipeline rupture is much steeper, and has the potential for extensive
Trucks and railroads are said to be less safe, reliable, and present more infrastructure concerns. The pipeline would serve as a faster, more direct way to transport oil across the country, and would open up multiple new markets for the oil industry. These new market include the mid-west, east coast, and the gulf (Gross). While these points are valid, pipelines have proven themselves to generate more widespread destruction when malfunction occurs. Pipeline spills and ruptures occur regularly. For example, in 2010 Enbridge Energy pipeline spilled 843,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, resulting in one of the largest inland oil spills in United States history (Healy). The clean up lasted for years and cost over a billion dollars. Again in 2013 the Tesoro Logistics pipeline in North Dakota burst and released 20,000 gallons of oil onto a wheat field costing over $4 million in clean up costs (Sider). The infamous cancelled Keystone XL Pipeline is another pipeline project gone deeply wrong, as it was shut down due to environmental concerns (Healy). Overall, the switch from automobile and train transport to a pipeline does not have enough environmental or safety impact to usher in such a dramatic change when the price of a pipeline rupture is much steeper, and has the potential for extensive