Environmentalists Blockade Themselves Inside Keystone Pipeline

On Monday, environmental activists protested the Keystone XL pipeline expansion in East Texas by physically going into the barrels and, “using a blockading technique never implemented before,” locking themselves between two barrels of concrete “located twenty-five feet into a pipe segment waiting to be laid into the ground.”

Police could not extract the protestors at first because conventional extraction techniques like cutting into the pipe would have endangered their lives. Eventually, after bringing in an ambulance to the scene, the protestors were forcibly extracted from the barrels and charged with three misdemeanors: “resisting arrest, criminal trespassing and illegal dumping.”

“TransCanada didn’t bother to ask the people of this neighborhood if they wanted to have millions of gallons of poisonous tar sands pumped through their backyards,” Matt Almonte, one of the protestors, said. “This multinational corporation has bullied landowners and expropriated homes to fatten its bottom line.”

The protestors are a part of the Tar Sands Blockade group that has staged similar protests across East Texas against what they feel is “dirty energy extraction.”