{"id":177288,"date":"2019-11-01T18:07:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T23:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/11\/01\/is-anyone-surprised-by-this\/"},"modified":"2019-11-01T18:07:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T23:07:00","slug":"is-anyone-surprised-by-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/11\/01\/is-anyone-surprised-by-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Anyone Surprised by This?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because I see the news that the Keystone Pipeline just had an oil spill of almost \u00bd million gallons<\/a> to be profoundly unsurprising.<\/p>\n

Trans Canada (or whatever the f%$# they are called these days) has a long history of spills and poor safety practices:<\/p>\n

Approximately 383,000 gallons of crude oil have spilled into a North Dakota wetland this week in the latest leak from the Keystone Pipeline, further fueling long-standing opposition to plans for the pipeline network\u2019s extension.<\/p>\n

With about half an Olympic swimming pool\u2019s worth of oil covering roughly half an acre, the leak is among the largest in the state, said Karl Rockeman, who directs the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality\u2019s division of water quality. But the spill does not appear to pose an immediate threat to public health, he added, as people do not live nearby and the wetland is not a source of drinking water.<\/p>\n

For environmental groups, though, the leak was further evidence that Canada-based pipeline owner TC Energy should not be allowed to build the controversial Keystone XL addition, which would stretch<\/a> more than 1,000 miles from Alberta into the United States. The Trump administration approved the plan in 2017 after years of protests<\/a>, but the project was blocked by a federal judge<\/a> who called for further study on environmental impacts.<\/span>

\u201cWith each one of these major spills that happens on the Keystone pipeline system, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is not safe,\u201d said Doug Hayes, an attorney leading the Sierra Club\u2019s work on Keystone XL. Critics worry about a similar mishap contaminating one of the hundreds of waterways along Keystone XL\u2019s expected path, he said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because I see the news that the Keystone Pipeline just had an oil spill of almost \u00bd million gallons to be profoundly unsurprising. Trans Canada (or whatever the f%$# they are called these days) has a long history of spills and poor safety practices: Approximately 383,000 gallons of crude oil have spilled into a North …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[457,484,578,548],"class_list":["post-177288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-energy","tag-environment","tag-incompetence","tag-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177288"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}