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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.lakotalaw.org/news/2020-07-17/dapl-leak-detection?utm_source=ea&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=arld&utm_content=textlink2&sourceid=1042264&emci=52f616df-78c8-ea11-9b05-00155d03bda0&emdi=5429ed5c-07c9-ea11-9b05-00155d03bda0&ceid=4606549">https://www.lakotalaw.org/news/2020-07-17/dapl-leak-detection?utm_source=ea&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=arld&utm_content=textlink2&sourceid=1042264&emci=52f616df-78c8-ea11-9b05-00155d03bda0&emdi=5429ed5c-07c9-ea11-9b05-00155d03bda0&ceid=4606549</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">DAPL’s Dangerous Leak Detection System • Lakota People's Law Project</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Kelsey Hill July 17, 2020<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>Every
day over the last three years, the Dakota Access pipeline has pumped
over half a million barrels of Bakken crude under Lake Oahe in North
Dakota — the sole source of drinking water for the people of the
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. All the while, it has operated with one of
most criminally inadequate leak detection systems of any pipeline in
America.</p><p>Thankfully, recent developments coming out of the
Washington D.C. court circuits have heralded a significant victory for
the Standing Rock movement. Federal Judge James E. Boasberg, after
vacating DAPL’s permit earlier this year over inadequate environmental
review, has <a href="https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/judge-orders-dakota-access-pipeline-to-shut-down" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ordered for the pipeline to be shut down and emptied of its oil</a>.
This followed similar victories in a ruling against the proposed
Keystone XL pipeline and the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast
pipeline. </p><p>In <a href="https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Energy-Transfer-Not-Shutting-Dakota-Access-Oil-Pipeline.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">response to the ruling</a>,
a spokeswoman for parent company Energy Transfer (ET) stated in an
email that the company would not be shutting down the line, clarifying
later that they’d be seeking relief through the court system. That
temporary relief came down earlier this week, when a Court of Appeals
froze Boasberg’s order. While this allows DAPL to stay online for
longer, the verdict maintains the authority to halt operations at any
time. </p><p>With the legal drama still unfurling, one thing is clear:
DAPL failed to meet basic environmental standards, and thus, it should
be shut down immediately. </p><p>DAPL’s potential hazard has not
lessened over time. Dakota Access was and is still one of the riskiest
freshwater crossings by any pipeline in the world, a fact which ET and
the Army Corps of Engineers obfuscated and downplayed as much as
possible in the approval process. Adding to the concern, if DAPL does
remain open, its oil load is scheduled to double soon, due to <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/02/19/dakota-access-pipeline-expansion-approved/4812580002/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a North Dakota Public Service Commission ruling approving</a> new pumping capability.</p><p>We
commend Boasberg’s decision to hold DAPL to account for its faulty
environmental review process. Oil projects, even ones that contribute to
large corporate profits, shouldn’t be above environmental laws in this
country. That’s why Lakota People’s Law Project attorneys filed an
amicus (“friend of the court”) brief elucidating that argument in
support of Standing Rock’s attorneys at Earthjustice. <a href="https://www.lakotalaw.org/resources/amicus-brief-dapl" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">You can read that here</a>.</p><p>As
the DAPL saga continues, now four years after the start of the Standing
Rock movement, it remains pertinent to understand just how deeply
disastrous this project is.</p></div><div><h3><strong>A Faulty System </strong></h3><p>The
Dakota Access pipeline is an unsafe piece of infrastructure. To begin
with, DAPL’s bore defies global and national standards for pipeline
safety. The 30-inch steel pipeline has been placed 92 to115 feet below
Lake Oahe, near the Standing Rock reservation boundary. The pipe was
routed under the lake using a technique called Horizontal Directional
Drilling (HDD), which involves drilling a series of boreholes of
increasing diameter while propping open the borehole and then threading
pipe through the tunnel that is created. According to an <a href="http://indigenousrising.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ENVY-Report-on-DAPL-EA-07Jan17.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">independent assessment</a>,
this is one of the longest HDD projects in the world and violates the
standard practice of limiting HDD to under a mile (5,280 ft).</p><p>There
are few, if any, crude oil pipelines in the world that have such a long
HDD component, especially under such a sensitive freshwater crossing
used for drinking water and agriculture. Worse, in the permitting
process, ET chose to reroute the pipeline adjacent to Lakota land, away
from its original trajectory nearer the largely-white areas of Bismarck
and Mandan. It also chose to throw out industry standards to create one
of the riskiest pipeline water crossings in the world. That is textbook
environmental racism. </p><p>Because DAPL is located near <a href="https://northdakotapipelines.com/maps/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">two natural gas pipelines</a>
that cross under Lake Oahe at a shallower depth, proponents of the
pipeline (i.e. “DAPL Facts”) attempt to dismiss concerns about DAPL’s
environmental impact, arguing there’s nothing uniquely threatening about
Dakota Access. However, since crude oil is more toxic and persistent
than natural gas, a leak in DAPL would be much more environmentally
damaging than a leak from one or both of the natural gas pipelines.</p><div><p>“Nobody
has really dug into this issue of a pipeline going under such a huge
body of freshwater in an important reservoir that is a drinking water
source for a lot of Americans, so I started to investigate everything
they had planned to do,” said Steve Martin, energy infrastructure expert
and enrollee of the Chippewa nation. “There is no leak detection system
in the most critical part of the pipeline [Lake Oahe].” </p><p>Although
Dakota Access has conspicuously not released any details on DAPL’s leak
detection system (LDS), an independent pipeline consulting company, <a href="http://www.envy.com.tr/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ENVY Enerji ve Çevre Yatırımları A.Ş.</a>, performed an <a href="http://indigenousrising.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ENVY-Report-on-DAPL-EA-07Jan17.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">assessment</a>
of DAPL’s environmental impact and found that DAPL’s LDS may be unable
to detect leaks of up to 1-2 percent of its total capacity per day (up
to 11,400 bbl/day or 480,000 gal/day). If such a leak were to occur
under Lake Oahe, it would be undetectable until the oil migrated to the
lake surface and was spotted by an observer<strong>. </strong>If a leak
occurred during the 3-4 months per year when the lake is covered in
several inches of ice, it may go undetected until the ice melts.</p></div></div><div><p>To
put it bluntly: DAPL is unable to detect 75 percent of potential leaks.
A leak detection system that can only detect leaks a quarter of the
time creates huge vulnerabilities, especially given the high risk it
poses to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Surface expressions should not
be the main way leaks get detected, particularly in areas like the Lake
Oahe crossing, where leaks may not migrate to the surface for days,
weeks, or even months.</p><h3><strong>And if it leaks? </strong></h3><p>A
leak under Lake Oahe could be unfixable. The lake crossing is more than
a mile long, nearly 100 feet under the bottom of the lakebed. A leak
there would mean construction teams would have to drain the pipeline,
pull it out from the ground, redrill the borehole, and push a new
section of pipeline through.</p><p>Moreover, it could potentially spell ruin for the people living downstream.</p><p>Should
a leak occur under the lake, containment and remediation efforts would
be greatly hampered by the depth of the pipeline underground and its
location under the lake. When discussing a worst case discharge
scenario, the Army Corps stated that routing the pipeline roughly 100
feet under the lake would have a “greater response time” and would
result in “high consequences.” </p><p>Despite the extreme challenges
posed by the physical location of the pipeline, the Army Corps does not
provide any plan in the existing assessment to contain an underground
leak or clean contaminated soil and groundwater under Lake Oahe, placing
a burden on the Tribe to do so. Additionally, <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ET?p=ET" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ET stock prices</a>
have been steadily dropping for the past four years, meaning the
company may not be in a solid enough financial position to pay for a
major cleanup project and would likely pass those costs onto local
landowners and federal taxpayers.</p><p>Additionally, the Army Cops
failed to account for the multi-directional flow of groundwater back and
forth between Lake Oahe and its underlying aquifers. Because the lake
feeds the aquifer when water levels are high and is fed by the aquifer
when water levels are low, an oil spill could either be confined to the
lake or pulled downward to contaminate connected aquifers. This
situation creates the possibility of a slow leak (less than 2 percent of
the pipeline’s daily flow rate) remaining undetectable as it
contaminates groundwater throughout the wet season when water is high,
only for that reservoir of contaminated groundwater to flow back up into
the lake during the dry season.</p><p>If this happens, it could literally poison the Native communities living nearby for years to come.</p><p>Crude
oil like that being pumped through DAPL is a mixture of thousands of
organic chemicals. This includes a large number of carcinogenic or
otherwise toxic chemicals, notably benzene and its derivatives, and a
class of compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
These chemicals, particularly PAHs, can <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074476" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bioaccumulate in plankton</a> and make their way up the food chain to harm fish, birds, and humans. </p><p>There
are at least nine threatened or endangered species within the DAPL
project area, including the pallid sturgeon, the grey wolf, and the
whooping crane, all of which may be directly or indirectly affected by a
spill. The accumulation of toxic substances in fish is particularly
relevant for Standing Rock Sioux tribal members, some of whom rely on
fish from Lake Oahe for subsistence. A spill would cut off members of
the Tribe from both their primary source of drinking water and a ready
source of high-quality protein they have utilized for thousands of
years. </p></div><div><h3><strong>Moving Forward </strong></h3><p>DAPL
should have never been built to begin with. Its environmental review
was just as flawed as its inadequate leak detection. It threatens the
life and livelihoods of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all the people
downriver. Oil flow should be shut off immediately.</p><p>As we await
further news from the D.C. courts, we hope that these dispatches from
the NoDAPL trial archives help to dispel myths about the so-called
safety of oil pipelines.<br></p></div></div></div>
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