Street Roots • Dec. 2-8, 2016
News
Page 4
SHUT IT
DOWN
-------------------------------------------
How five activists
stopped the flow
of Alberta Tar
Sands oil into
the United States
PHOTO COURTESY OF CLIMATE DIRECT ACTION
BY EMILY GREEN
I STAFF WRITER
Leonard Higgins sits in his girlfriend’s Southeast Portland home shortly after having breakfast Nov. 17 with his fellow Valve Turners,
the group of climate activists who shut down five oil pipelines in October. Higgins faces up to 10 years in prison for his part in the
shutdown. Top: The Valve Turners, from left: Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, Higgins, Ken Ward and Michael Foster.
eonard Higgins was starting to panic.
The industrial chain he was
attempting to cut loose was made of
case-hardened steel. It was thicker and
more durable than chains he’d practiced
breaking in preparation for this moment.
As he strained to pull the handles of the
40-inch bolt cutters toward one another, he was
running out of time.
The muted glow of daybreak had already
begun to spread across the rolling plains of
north-central Montana’s Chouteau County,
revealing the snow-speckled farmland that
surrounded him.
Temperatures hovered around 30 degrees
Fahrenheit, but the 64-year-old was working up
a sweat.
Now retired, Higgins had spent 31 years
working as a project manager for various state
departments in Oregon, including for the
Department of Revenue and the Secretary of
State’s Office.
But on the morning of Oct 11, he was
attempting to break into a remote enclosure
L
that housed a block valve attached to an
underground crude oil pipeline. The valve was
just south of Coal Banks Landing, an old
steamboat stop along the Missouri River.
The plan was to manually close the pipeline,
an illegal and risky maneuver.
After what seemed like an eternity, he broke
though one side of a link in the chain that held
the enclosure’s gate. But instead of relief, his
panic grew. Other chains had fallen apart once
severed, but this one remained steadfast.
As Higgins put all his might into repeating
the battle on the other side of the link, a
22-year-old activist from Seattle, Reed Ingalls,
held up his smartphone, live-streaming the
break-in on Facebook. A documentarian, who
Higgins won’t name, was also filming on site.
Higgins knew 10 minutes had passed since
the first call was made to Spectra Energy
Corp., warning that a block valve on the
company’s Express pipeline was about to be
closed.
He had to get inside the fenced enclosure
and manually close the valve before sheriffs
deputies arrived.
If he got arrested before he was able to
complete his task, it would blow an operation
that had taken months of research and scouting
missions to plan.
The chain finally gave way, and Higgins ran
to the valve where he cut through a second
chain, this time with ease. He began to turn a
spoked wheel attached to metal housing and a
network of pipes protruding from the gravel
beneath his boots.
He watched an oil-flow meter as he spun the
wheel clockwise. After 40 or 50 turns of the
wheel, the needle indicating the volume of oil
flowing through the pipe hadn’t budged.
Higgins looked below the meter and
discovered a dial with settings that read
“remote” and “local.” He pressed the dial and
turned it to local, and that’s when he heard a
motor begin to run. The needle on the meter
began to drop.
He had done it. He had closed the
emergency block valve.
See THE MISSION, page 5