Often referred to with the less-ominous term “saltwater,” the brine that spilled that day is fracking wastewater laced with chemicals (sometimes including lead, lithium, methanol, hydrochloric acid, boric acid, and tetrakis phosphonium, a pesticide) and is about 10 times saltier than ocean water. Some batches even contain traces of radium, a naturally occurring radioactive element. About 10 barrels of wastewater brine are produced during flowback for every barrel of oil, and each well creates millions of gallons of this brine. “The general public thinks, oh, it’s just a salt spill. No, it’s a lot more than that,” Baker explained later. “You can have a mixture of contaminants and all kinds of nasty stuff—the stuff they put down the hole and want to get rid of.”
At the site, Baker was concerned about water contamination and requested assistance from North Dakota’s State Health Department, which is typically in charge of public safety in the aftermath of spills throughout the state. However, after the representative made one short trip to the spill scene, he was asked not to return. An Environmental Protection Agency representative was also denied access to the site at first. Baker later heard that these orders had come from a tribal councilmember. Baker was shocked. “There was the need for the EPA’s guidance because there was risk of water pollution,” he said.
In addition, Baker’s superior requested that he not talk to the press. A couple of reporters had showed up, including an Associated Press reporter named Josh Wood. Wood had read a report from the Forum News Service that an eyewitness had seen oil sheen on the Missouri River downstream from the spill. When Wood arrived at the site on July 9, he wasn’t permitted to see the spill and was told to come back the next day. But the next morning, officials had roped off a “media zone” and wouldn’t let reporters near the affected area, threatening to arrest anyone who stepped past the zone or snapped unauthorized photos. Wood and his photographer eventually received a guided tour of the site with a Crestwood representative, but besides viewing a small area of dead vegetation, they couldn’t see much. “The tribe had authority on who was doing the spill investigation, giving them complete control with what seemed to be very little oversight,” said Wood.
Meanwhile, citizens of Mandaree had no idea if the source of their drinking water had been contaminated.
* * *
Lisa DeVille, a tribal member and environmental activist on the reservation, wasn’t surprised by the lack of information. The day of the spill, DeVille was cooking dinner at her home in Mandaree. Around 5:30 p.m., she received a text from her friend Denise. “There’s something going on,” her friend wrote. “I think there’s been a spill.” DeVille quickly finished cooking and drove around town to see if there were any clues to where the spill was located. She saw a helicopter land in a clearing north of town and saw one of the tribe’s pro-oil councilmen emerge. She knew it must be bad if the tribe’s councilmen were responding to the scene—spills happened nearly every day on the reservation, and no one paid them any attention.
DeVille, a youthful 41-year-old with long brown hair, a strong jaw, and piercing eyes, had been fighting with oil companies for over four years. She and her husband, Walter DeVille, also an environmental activist, grew up in Mandaree, and they had five children and two grandchildren. DeVille’s family had been on the reservation for generations. Her grandmother, Julia Charging White Eagle, was born in Elbowoods in 1919. In 2010, when oil drilling intensified on the reservation, a friend showed DeVille something suspicious next to an oil well on her property—snow around the natural gas flare was stained yellow. DeVille didn’t know what it was or if it was toxic. She called the tribe’s environmental division, then run by Baker’s predecessor, but no one could give her an answer. She began researching on her own and contacted a science professor at Fort Berthold Community College, Dr. Kerry Hartman, for help. He told her about oil field brine and explained that much of its content is unknown. Dr. Hartman encouraged her to return to school to answer some of her questions and become an advocate for the reservation.
“My grandmother taught us how important the environment was,” said DeVille. “The air, the grass, the land, the water. It’s all life. If you contaminate or destroy it, you’re not going to live.”
Once DeVille began speaking out against the oil development at community meetings, she found a small coalition of other tribal members who were upset by the changes to their reservation. The most vocal among them were women—particularly two sisters named Theodora and Joletta Bird Bear. They formed the Fort Berthold Protectors of Water and Earth Rights (POWER) and joined forces with farmers, including Donny Nelson, through the Dakota Resource Council.
Some women, such as Marilyn Hudson, showed her support but felt conflicted at times. The money Hudson received from her mineral rights allowed her to pay expensive medical bills and feel more secure in retirement. Many of her friends had benefited financially as well. Even Lisa DeVille had some oil money coming in from Walter’s family’s land. Though he split the royalties with his siblings, the amount was nearly enough to support their whole family. Others signed away rights but later regretted it and joined forces with environmental protection efforts. Theodora Bird Bear, however, didn’t want well sites anywhere near her home. Mineral plots on the reservation hadn’t been sliced into tiny pieces to the same extent as on nontribal lands, so owners had more power to stop the oil companies from drilling—though few did. As of 2015, she was one of the few mineral-owning tribal members to successfully deny the oil companies access to her land.
After the Crestwood spill, DeVille’s anger toward the oil companies and the regulatory agencies only intensified. The tribal council claimed it was testing drinking water sources in the area but gave no indication that it planned to release the results to the public or even to the tribe’s own environmental director, Edmund Baker. Baker found this highly suspicious—why not release the results if there was nothing to hide? Baker’s department had little leverage with oil companies, and within a few weeks, cleanup efforts had all but ceased. “The company doing remediation was giving biased reports, understating certain things, and doing things on purpose to slow things down,” Baker said. “And politics reared its ugly head. There is a tendency to minimize the scarring environmentally because this is revenue for the tribe.”
The public, for the most part, didn’t seem fazed. This was what typically happened after spills. Though more local and national media covered the Bear Den Bay spill because of its size, location, and possible contamination of a major drinking water source, they quickly moved on. A few weeks later, on August 22, another pipeline spill occurred near Mandaree—126,000 gallons of brine leaked from a different Crestwood-owned pipeline. But the media barely covered it. Crestwood spills were old news.
* * *
More than 4,000 brine spills have been documented in the state since the boom began. Leakage into rivers or fragile wetlands is especially harmful to local wildlife. A 2006 spill that leaked more than a million gallons of brine into a North Dakota creek near the town of Alexander caused a massive die-off of fish, turtles, and plant life. The creek still showed damage 10 years later. Longtime farmers and ranchers in the region know this phenomenon all too well. Donny Nelson still has sections on his farm that have never fully recovered from saltwater spills in the 1950s and 1980s. “They’ve tried rehabbing it, and it’ll grow weeds for a while and then they start dying off. It will never grow anything in probably tens of thousands of years,” said Nelson. “Up in the northern counties in the state, it’s unbelievable. There’s hundreds of acres, and nobody’s doing anything about it. Bankers and lenders are starting not to lend money to buy the land because it’s contaminated.”
Unfortunately, state records and industry documentation of how much oil and brine spills is poor. In July 2011, the company Petro Harvester reported a 12,600-gallon brine spill near the 700-person town of Mohall, but after further inspection, officials revised the spill to 2 million gallons. However, state records still list the original 12,600-gallon
amount. Kris Roberts at the state’s Health Department told reporters he saw no point in changing it. “If we try to go back and revisit the past over and over and over again, what’s it going to do? Nothing good.” Between 2009 and 2011, oil companies reported dozens of spills totaling about 1.7 million gallons of brine, but companies often don’t know how much spills and base their estimates on the amount recovered after much of the liquid has already soaked into the soil. Many companies report zero barrels spilled—which could mean either nothing spilled, or they simply could not come up with an accurate estimate.
What’s more, the radioactive waste from brine isn’t limited to radium in the soil and water. Small nets called filter socks are used on pipes to sift out solid material from the brine during the disposal process, and an estimated 75 tons of those filter socks are generated every day in the state. Before 2016, the North Dakota health code did not allow the disposal of radioactive materials higher than 5 picocuries per gram in state landfills; however, filter socks can contain as high as 70 picocuries per gram. Companies therefore trucked them out of state to dispose of them—an expensive task that led to frequent illegal dumping incidents. Piles of filter socks were found in dumpsters, ditches, or abandoned buildings; one was found at the entrance of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. In 2016, instead of cracking down on illegal dumping, the state simply raised the disposal limit to 50 picocuries per gram.
Of course, as in many areas where oil development takes place, oil spills are also common. In the fall of 2013, one of the largest inland pipeline oil spills in U.S. history happened about 60 miles from the reservation. More than 865,000 gallons of crude oil gushed onto a farmer’s field from a broken pipeline run by Tesoro Logistics. The farmer, Steven Jensen, didn’t discover the spill until days, or possibly weeks, after it occurred, and the Health Department didn’t report the spill to the public until a week later (after a reporter asked about it). The spill contaminated about 15 acres of Jensen’s cropland, and cleanup efforts were still under way two years later. In 2015, after a pipeline burst and 50,000 gallons of Bakken crude spilled into the Yellowstone River near Glendive, Montana, traces of benzene from the oil were found in Glendive’s drinking water. State officials trucked in bottled water for residents until the contamination cleared a few days later. Smaller oil spills happened daily in the region. But Edmund Baker isn’t nearly as concerned about oil as he is about brine spills: With oil, “companies will take extra measures to protect their product in terms of leak-protection systems,” he said. “They’ve got all these bells and whistles to counteract losing the product. But with a brine pipeline, that’s not the case. We’ve seen a lot of efforts to save money.”
In addition, there’s little regulatory oversight when companies install pipelines. North Dakota had only a few pipeline inspectors and didn’t require companies to reveal any data about smaller pipelines, even basic things like their location, until April 2014. Fines against companies are limited to $12,500 a day and often go uncollected. Companies have been known to take shortcuts. More than 50 percent of pipeline incidents were due to either equipment failures or corrosion, according to a report by the Pipeline Safety Trust, an independent nonprofit organization. “Some of these pipes were put into place too soon, too fast,” Mark Fox, the tribe’s chairman after Tex Hall, told reporters. Fox, who was more critical of oil development, continued, “The integrity is questionable in many areas.”
* * *
Nearly one year after the Crestwood spill at Bear Den Bay, DeVille was finishing her degree in environmental science at Fort Berthold Community College and had turned her attention to opposing new pipeline projects, such as one through the ecologically fragile Missouri grasslands. Then one day, a researcher at Duke University named Dr. Avner Vengosh called her. He wanted to travel to North Dakota with a team of researchers and conduct a water contamination study at the Bear Den Bay site, among other brine spill sites throughout the state. Dr. Vengosh chose North Dakota because he was unable to locate any peer-reviewed studies on the environmental effects of fracking in the area. Most researchers had focused on other drilling hubs in the country. He was surprised so little research had been done on North Dakota, given the magnitude of oil activity there.
DeVille agreed to show him the spill site, and they went out on a blistering hot day in July. To enter the site, they had to pass a checkpoint manned by a single guard, but he waved them through after DeVille told him they were simply visiting the waterfront. They hiked down a steep slope to the spill site, and when they arrived, Dr. Vengosh was shocked by the destruction. Large swaths of grass were tinged brown and small ponds of brine stood stagnant, glistening with a metallic sheen in the sunlight. They snapped photos of the dead vegetation and collected brine and water samples. “We were surprised to see that you could still find brine,” said Dr. Vengosh, “because it was almost a year after the spill. You could easily see the spill pathway.”
DeVille was grateful for the researcher’s attention to the issue because yet another spill from a Crestwood-owned pipeline had happened a few months earlier, not far from Bear Den Bay. And North Dakota’s largest brine spill to date had occurred in early 2015 north of Williston—some 3 million gallons of salty brine spilled into a creek that fed the Missouri River, a drinking water source. The pipeline was only six months old and had a monitoring system installed, but no one had bothered to turn it on. Then DeVille discovered that approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline was near.
The Dakota Access Pipeline would begin in North Dakota, travel through South Dakota and Iowa, and end in Patoka, Illinois, extending some 1,170 miles in total. The $3.7 billion pipeline would have an initial capacity of 470,000 barrels of oil of day, and its company, Energy Transfer Partners, claimed it would create 8,000 to 12,000 construction jobs and generate $156 million in sales and income taxes to state and local governments.
Though the pipeline wouldn’t directly cut across any reservations, it would border two—Fort Berthold and Standing Rock—and the only places where the pipeline would cross under the Missouri River in North Dakota were near the reservations. The original path was closer to Bismarck, but the Army Corps of Engineers ultimately decided against it, partly because of its proximity to a large population and their water supply. Many Native Americans were furious that the corps would choose to endanger their lands and water instead of those of the mostly white population of Bismarck. DeVille was particularly angry because the pipeline would pass Mandaree by fewer than 10 miles and cross under another tributary of Lake Sakakawea, Fort Berthold’s main source of drinking water. For those who had lived through the Garrison Dam flooding, it felt as if history were repeating itself. The U.S. government would once again decide the fate of how the Missouri River would impact the reservation.
DeVille traveled down to Killdeer, North Dakota, to speak out against the Dakota Access Pipeline in June 2015. Joletta and Theodora Bird Bear were also there to speak. DeVille stood in front of the North Dakota Public Service Commission and read a letter she had prepared. Her voice shook at first, but she continued reading: “I, Lisa DeVille, and environmentally concerned citizens of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline Project. We have witnessed many pipelines malfunction in North Dakota causing toxic environmental impact.” She mentioned the Bear Den Bay spill, the 3-million-gallon spill near Williston, and evidence of long-term contamination from a 2010 pipeline spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. “We know ‘Big Oil’ and its supportive political leadership will continue to chip away at sovereign nations’ rights and the environmental laws already in place,” she said. “We are counting on you to help stop them.”
The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation south of Fort Berthold had not yet dealt with intense oil drilling activity—the boom hadn’t hit that far south yet, and many Fort Berthold tribal members wanted to warn Standing Rock members of the downsides before it was too late. Reservations across the country saw Fort Berthold as a cautionary tale of what could happe
n when tribes allowed oil companies to invade with little regulation. “I never would’ve expected, prior to 2006, a big energy project like this on Fort Berthold,” said Theodora Bird Bear. “None of us did. But if it can happen here, it can happen to anybody, anywhere. All the pipelines that have failed are a warning. People need to become knowledgeable and not to be afraid, not to be intimidated. Our children will be dealing with the pipelines in 20 years. What will be the integrity of the pipelines then? Crestwood’s pipeline was just a few years old, and it’s already failed four times. So what’s the future mean?”
Despite the women’s testimonies, the North Dakota Public Service Commission gave a green light to the Dakota Access Pipeline in early 2016, and construction began in the state. However, Energy Transfer Partners still needed approval from the Army Corps of Engineers to cross public waterways. The pipeline would cross hundreds of waterways, but the places of concern were closest to large drinking water sources for the reservations: the Missouri River northwest of Fort Berthold, the Little Missouri River near Mandaree, and Lake Oahe, 500 feet from the Standing Rock Reservation.
Finally, in April 2016, Dr. Vengosh and his team published a report that they had found widespread water contamination at spill sites in North Dakota, including the million-gallon Crestwood spill. They found high levels of ammonium, selenium, lead, radium, and other toxic contaminants exceeding federal guidelines for safe drinking water. Dr. Vengosh concluded there was “clear evidence of direct water contamination from fracking” across the oil patch, and at the Bear Den Bay spill site, a particularly concerning accumulation of radium was found in the soil. Dr. Vengosh’s team couldn’t determine if toxins had entered Mandaree’s drinking water supply (since their data was taken nearly a year after the spill), but recommended continued monitoring.
The New Wild West Page 24
