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  • 2016-11-30 (xsd:date)
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  • DAPL Routed Through Standing Rock After Bismarck Residents Said No? (en)
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  • On 29 October 2016, rumors appeared on social media that the contested Dakota Access pipeline was originally slated to pass through Bismarck, and had been re-routed across the Standing Rock Reservation when the city's mostly white residents refused to accept the risks the pipeline posed to their drinking water: The tweets made a very specific claim about the Dakota Access pipeline's contentious route: that the pipeline was only routed across the disputed territory because Bismarck's white residents were unwilling to allow their own water supply to be threatened. According to another tweet, the Sioux were literally being forced at gunpoint to allow the pipeline to cross their land when residents of Bismarck had simply been given the option to refuse it. Articles about the claim referenced an 18 August 2016 story in the Bismarck Tribune as their source. The piece was published not long after the start of protests at Standing Rock, but some nuance was lost in subsequent citations of the article: According to that source, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (not the residents of Bismarck) considered and rejected an alternate route through the city in DAPL's early planning stages. The plan was quickly abandoned, not because the Sioux were considered to be less valuable than their neighbors in Bismarck, but because the alternate route ran an additional eleven miles and included several more water crossings. Additionally, the decision to abandon that route came from a planning party, and did not appear to have anything to do with one set of residents being heard while a second set was ignored. A 25 July 2016 environmental assessment prepared on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers contained what appeared to be the source material for the Bismarck claims: Both early reports and Army Corps of Engineers documents showed that an early, scrapped plan did propose a pipeline route north of Bismarck, but the Army Corps of Engineers opted to re-route it via Lake Oahe, citing a shorter pipeline, fewer water crossings, and reduced proximity to residential areas. The decision appeared to have been unrelated to objections from residents of Bismarck, and no plan was ever solidified to route the pipeline north of the city before its residents shut it down. (en)
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