11/2/19

Dakota Rural Action still suing Republicans over water quality


South Dakota's GOP/Koch-owned Public Utilities Cartel (SDPUC) is expected to shoo in TransCanada's permit to seize water and land as they do with each utilities' requests for rate increases.
Three permits are for the taking of public water from rivers (the Cheyenne, Bad, and White), and two permits are for use of previously-appropriated water permitted for livestock watering that would serve as back-up supply for TransCanada’s construction worker man camps. Dakota Rural Action and other contesting parties recognize that this water belongs to the people of South Dakota, and that the Water Management Board, as trustee of our water, has the authority to say no. And, through the course of these hearings, we are building a powerful case that the Board has the responsibility to say no to a foreign corporation with a devastating history of spills and leaks that have damaged land and water in this state and others in which they operate. [Dakota Rural Action]
Nearly every moving stream, intermittent or not in South Dakota, has supported a pre-settlement Amerindian or European explorer pulling and propelling a canoe over it. Most of it is impaired today.

Royal Dutch Shell is abandoning its efforts to drill in the Arctic in part because of tanking oil prices but another Republican donor continues its land grab in South Dakota. So-called 'Americans for Prosperity' a Koch-funded group with a lobbyist based in Sioux Falls signaled to legislators that they will lose campaign funding from the Kochs unless they act to reverse the progress the US Environmental Protection Agency has made in South Dakota.

Genesee & Wyoming, the parent company of the Rapid City, Pierre and Eastern Railroad, conducts the business on the west end of its holdings and operates on the right of way that intersects the proposed Keystone XL pipeline at Philip. Had the Quinn Dam just upstream of a RCPE washout failed one of its first casualties could have been the Keystone XL pipeline where it's proposed to cross the Bad River.

Rail cars carrying diluted bitumen could be loaded there then be transported through Pierre, Huron and maybe Brookings then south through Sioux Falls to the depot at Cushing, Oklahoma; but, the same geology that thwarts railroads and forces engineers to rebuild I-90 between Reliance and Rapid City and I-94 between Mandan, North Dakota and Billings, Montana every year also makes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline untenable.

Running a bomb train through white towns won't fly when you can build a leaky pipeline through stolen treaty ground so it's hard to imagine these projects going through cemeteries where people of European descent are buried.

1 comment:

larry kurtz said...

"The EWG study, which uses a two-year average of data from 2015-17, reported that 291 South Dakota utilities serving about 703,500 people had unhealthful levels of trihalomethanes, or THMs, the chlorine byproduct that can cause bladder and skin cancers and inhibit fetal growth. The study found that 234 systems serving 458,500 people had unhealthful levels of nitrate; 83 systems serving 421,250 people had unhealthful levels of chromium; 37 systems serving 201,000 people had unhealthful levels of arsenic; and 210 systems serving 220,000 people had unhealthful levels of radium or uranium." South Dakota News Watch