More than 20 demonstrators have blocked the tracks leading to an oil train terminal near Clatskanie to protest the shipment of crude oil to the facility on the Columbia River.
Protesters with the group Portland Rising Tide provided photos showing a 27-year-old activist, Sunny Glover, sitting in a tripod of 20-foot-high metal poles erected over the tracks Thursday afternoon.
No arrests have been made. A Columbia County Sheriff’s Office receptionist said the sheriff and deputies were en route.
It’s the second oil train protest on tracks in Oregon since June, when the same group blockaded an oil train terminal run by Arc Logistics on the Willamette River near Portland. Five climate protesters were also arrested in early September outside an Everett, Wash., rail terminal.
“This is only the beginning,” said Noah Hochman, a Portland Rising Tide representative. “We will continue to blockade until it is financially, logistically, and politically untenable for oil trains to threaten climate and communities.”
The protesters say the country’s fossil-fuel infrastructure should be dismantled to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. In a statement, they said they also feared the risks posed by oil train traffic to communities along the rail line to Clatskanie.
The oil train facility there, owned by Massachusetts-based Global Partners, began operating in November 2012, unloading oil produced in North Dakota onto trains bound for West Coast refineries. An average of three mile-long trains serve the facility weekly, each carrying 70,000 barrels of oil. The terminal fueled a 250 percent increase in oil train traffic in Oregon last year.
It began moving oil without the public’s knowledge. In June 2012, Oregon environmental regulators quickly approved a routine permit change that allowed the terminal to annually move 50 million gallons of crude oil instead of ethanol from trains onto barges, saying the shift had an incidental effect on the site’s air pollution.
The impact on nearby communities was far from incidental. It cleared the way for oil trains to move through Oregon without the public knowing they were coming. Global Partners exceeded that limit last year, drawing a $117,000 fine from the state Department of Environmental Quality.