The Dakota Access Pipeline will come online despite recent attempts to sabotage construction on the multi-billion project, according to court documents filed Monday.
Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), a Texas-based energy company, filed a legal filing with few details about the sabotage efforts, suggesting only that they “pose threats to life, physical safety and the environment.”
“These coordinated attacks will not stop line-fill operations. With that in mind, the company now believes that oil may flow sometime this week,” the company wrote in a 27-page filing.
A spokeswoman for ETP declined to elaborate on the attacks.
Rob Keller, a spokesman for the Morton County sheriff’s office, which has been at the center of violent encounters between law enforcement and anti-DAPL activists, told The Daily Caller News Foundation there haven’t been any reports of attacks in North Dakota.
The so-called DAPL, which will shuttle 500,000 barrels of Bakken oil from North Dakota to Illinois, could have come under attack at some other section of the project. The project is nearly 1,200 miles long.
Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux members continue to flail away at the project through the court system but with little to show for their efforts.
Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court said on March 15 that preventing oil from coursing through the pipeline would run against public interest.
Boasberg ruled the court “acknowledges that the tribe is likely to suffer irreparable harm to its members’ religious exercise if oil is introduced into the pipeline, but Dakota Access would also be substantially harmed by an injunction, given the financial and logistical injuries that would ensue.”
Standing Rock and environmentalists believe the pipeline’s construction trampled on tribal lands and could poison the tribe’s waterways, including rivers such as the Missouri River and Lake Oahe.
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