Opponents of Planned Louisiana Pipeline Document 144 Pipeline Accidents in 2016

As the Dakota Access Pipeline fight in North Dakota reaches a lull, a new pipeline battle is taking shape 1,500 miles away in the swamps of southern Louisiana — and opponents there are borrowing directly from the playbook that made Standing Rock a national story.

A Map Built From a Year of Accidents

Ahead of a Thursday public hearing on the proposed Bayou Bridge pipeline, environmental and corporate accountability activists compiled a comprehensive map of every pipeline accident reported to federal authorities across Louisiana over the preceding year — 144 in total. Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the group behind the report, said nearly half of those accidents trace back to holes, corrosion, and a general lack of maintenance across the state’s existing pipeline infrastructure — evidence, she argues, that adding hundreds more miles of pipeline through the same fragile landscape would compound a safety record already, in her group’s assessment, in “deplorable condition.”

The Route in Question

Bayou Bridge, proposed by Energy Transfer Partners — the same company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline — would effectively form the southern tail end of that same controversial pipeline system, carrying crude oil across southern Louisiana toward export terminals near the Gulf Coast. The 24-inch pipeline’s proposed route would cross roughly 700 separate bodies of water, including a significant stretch through the Atchafalaya Basin, a 1.4-million-acre expanse of cypress marsh and wetland forest that Basinkeeper executive director Dean Wilson describes as the largest swamp remaining in North America, and historically the single most critical migratory bird habitat in the Western Hemisphere.

Borrowing Standing Rock’s Energy, and Its Skepticism

Rolfes has been candid about where much of the current mobilization’s momentum is coming from. “It’s pretty interesting the way that this part of the world has been awakened because of what’s happened in North Dakota and the fight over that pipeline,” she said, describing public hearings like Thursday’s as typically hollow procedural exercises. “In my experience, these public hearings are something done just to satisfy some angry people and they don’t consider the comments at all and just go ahead and do what they want.” Even so, she’s confident Bayou Bridge’s backers are underestimating what they’re walking into: “In this case, they can ignore the comments if they want and permit this pipeline. I can promise you they will have a real fight on their hands.”

That fight has already drawn indigenous and environmental activists who cut their teeth at Standing Rock directly into the Louisiana campaign. Cherri Foytlin, an Indigenous activist leading the environmental group Bold Louisiana, invoked the North Dakota standoff explicitly at a rally preceding the hearing: “If you thought you saw some stuff up in North Dakota, you just get to the bayous! Our campers walk on water.”

A Fight Against Powerful, Bipartisan Backing

Unlike Standing Rock, where opposition drew sustained national political attention, Bayou Bridge’s opponents face a more locally unified front of support: the area’s Republican congressman and Louisiana’s Democratic governor both back the pipeline, and Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources had already approved the project by the time this report aired. The oil and gas industry itself employs roughly 30,000 people directly in Louisiana and supports tens of thousands of additional jobs, giving the pipeline considerable institutional momentum that the more geographically isolated Dakota Access fight never had to contend with in the same way.

Former Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, now working as an energy industry lobbyist, made that institutional alignment explicit at the hearing itself, telling the audience, amid audible boos, “I would be testifying for this pipeline even if I did not work for them” — a moment that crystallized, for opponents in the room, exactly the kind of revolving-door relationship between government, industry, and lobbying interests they argue has left Louisiana’s existing pipeline network so poorly regulated in the first place. Rolfes was blunter still about the state’s regulatory posture: “They don’t enforce the regulations, they don’t fine people. They let them pollute and they give them the permits to do so.”

Just the Opening Round

Thursday’s hearing marked only the beginning of what both sides expected to be a prolonged fight. Energy Transfer Partners still needed sign-off from Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before construction could begin — approvals opponents intended to contest at every subsequent stage, drawing on the same direct-action tactics and sustained public pressure that, however the Dakota Access fight ultimately resolved, had already proven the model could galvanize national attention toward a regional pipeline fight most Americans would otherwise never have heard of.

For related coverage of pipeline resistance movements, see our piece on Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Harold Frazier’s meeting with President Obama over Dakota Access, or browse our full Environment archive.