Swamp Line 9 Update

26 June 2013 Twen­ty peo­ple were arrest­ed this morn­ing Hamil­ton cops tried to arrest every­one on the site except a few who were able to leave.

26 June 2013 Twen­ty peo­ple were arrest­ed this morn­ing Hamil­ton cops tried to arrest every­one on the site except a few who were able to leave.

SwampLine9 is still hold­ing strong. Four peo­ple are on lock down while most of the camp is still on site despite the injunc­tion dead­line expir­ing at 10am this morn­ing. Enbridge was unable to even get the address right of the rever­sal site on the injunc­tion and is now scram­bling to cor­rect its mis­take.

You can see more pho­tos of the action here: http://on.fb.me/17AZ4bQ

Sol­i­dar­i­ty actions took place across Cana­da includ­ing one of Toronto’s busiest streets shut down for near­ly an hour as over 50 SwampLine sup­port­ers orches­trat­ed a mock oil spill and fly­ered vehi­cles.

Pho­tos from Cross-Cana­da Day of Action: http://on.fb.me/121U7AT

 

Swamp Line 9 State­ment 25th June 3:30pm

7 Hours ago we were served an injunc­tion that gave us 2 hours to leave the prop­er­ty. We kept our shit togeth­er, and are work­ing togeth­er to keep this thing going. While some peo­ple packed up the camp and shut­tled stuff to the top of the dri­ve­way, oth­ers built an elab­o­rate bar­ri­cade at the back and put them­selves in an encase­ment. 3 peo­ple are inside of the encase­ment and are locked to the fence which leads into the con­struc­tion site. 1 oth­er per­son is sit­ting on top of the bar­ri­cade and hold­ing tight. About 20 of us are camped out in the mid­dle of the dri­ve­way where it meets Con­ces­sion 6, and are going to keep nego­ti­a­tions up to hold this space as best as we can. 

Despite ear­li­er reports, police are not block­ing access to this site. We are ask­ing for as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble to come and join our action as it con­tin­ues to shift and respond to this sit­u­a­tion. If a sit­u­a­tion arris­es where we can no longer safe­ly hold down this dri­ve­way, we will move our action to the oth­er side of the street and con­tin­ue to show sup­port with the peo­ple locked down. 

Our camp­ing days may be over, but for now this strug­gle lives on. Those 4 bad-ass­es at the back of the site have built an impres­sive and sol­id bar­ri­cade, and we don’t expect the police or Enbridge will be able to remove them from the site any­time soon. 

Now that things have set­tled down a lit­tle bit we will be post­ing reg­u­lar updates, so stay tuned to our tum­blr site and fol­low us on twit­ter @Swampline9. 

Swamp on, 

-SL9

 

Back­ground on Line 9

Line 9: The Tar Sands Come to Ontario from Rachel Deutsch on Vimeo.

Line 9 was built in 1975 to trans­port import­ed oil from Mon­tre­al to refiner­ies in Sar­nia. Enbridge has now applied to Canada’s Nation­al Ener­gy Board to reverse its direc­tion of flow so that it can trans­port oil from Sar­nia to Mon­tre­al.

Enbridge admits that among the pos­si­ble uses of Line 9 is trans­port­ing “heavy oil” a cat­e­go­ry that includes bitu­men, the haz­ardous raw mate­r­i­al extract­ed from tar sands.

The pipeline pass­es through cities, water­sheds, rivers, and farm­land. 9.1 mil­lion peo­ple live with­in 50 km of line 9, includ­ing 18 first nations com­mu­ni­ties and 115 com­mu­ni­ties in total. (Sar­nia, Hamil­ton, North York, Kingston, etc.)

Enbridge has a very poor record of envi­ron­men­tal impact. Between 1999 and 2008, Enbridge lists 610 spills that released approx­i­mate­ly 21 mil­lion litres of hydro­car­bons into the sur­round­ing area. But Enbridge is most well-known for their 3.8 mil­lion litre spill in Kala­ma­zoo Michi­gan in 2010, amount­ing to the largest inland oil spill in US his­to­ry. Because the spill involved the very hard to clean tar sands bitu­men rather than con­ven­tion­al crude oil, the clean-up is still on-going. Mean­while to this day, res­i­dents are still sick from the after­math of the spill, and trag­i­cal­ly many have died since. Most trou­bling for Ontario res­i­dents is that the pipeline that rup­tured in Kala­ma­zoo is almost iden­ti­cal to Line 9: it is part of the same pipeline net­work, uses the same inte­ri­or lin­ing, and is almost the same age.

With so much at risk, we need to work togeth­er to stop Enbridge Line 9. The big pic­ture is spills, con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, and expand­ing the tar sands. The even big­ger pic­ture is cli­mate change. If it is not halt­ed, cli­mate change will and is result­ing in increased fre­quen­cy and sever­i­ty of storms, floods, drought, and water short­age, as well as the spread of dis­ease, increased hunger, dis­place­ment and mass migra­tions of peo­ple and ensu­ing social con­flict and war.