All right, my Native American friends, I’m guest-hosting the KFGO Radio “Afternoon Show” from 2 to 5 p.m. Thursday. The media has complained you haven’t been available for interviews. Please have some of your spokespersons call in to outline your positions. The more you speak the less I have to You’ll be on the No.1 talk show in the state. …
Note: This story has been updated since it was originally posted Friday evening. Late Friday, North Dakota’s governor, Jack Dalrymple, declared that a state of emergency existed in south-central North Dakota, due to a large gathering, in temporary campgrounds, of opponents of the placement of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River on the edge of the Standing Rock …
In North Dakota, if you’re an oil field company and you violate laws or regulations, you sometimes get fined for your misdeeds. Sometimes, the fines are as much as $200,000. Sometimes, they’re only $50,000 or $10,000. No matter. No one ever pays them. Because the philosophy of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, and its chairman, Jack Dalrymple, our state’s governor, is …
We return now to an old, familiar story, a story of some really bad guys doing some really bad things to the North Dakota environment (or enviornment, as the Bismarck Tribune spells it in really big headlines on the front page today — have you ever seen a worse newspaper?), getting caught by state “regulators,” then given a slap on …
The noose around James Henrikson’s neck got a little tighter this week —figuratively speaking, since prosecutors have decided not to seek the death penalty for Henrikson for allegedly masterminding the murder-for-hire that included the killing of a young North Dakota oilfield worker. Henrikson sat in a Spokane, Wash., courtroom this past Wednesday and watched three men who carried out the …
A month or so ago, in an article I first wrote for Dakota Country magazine and posted later here on my blog, I talked a bit about my father and his love of North Dakota’s outdoors. If you missed that, you can read it here. I need to share a few more words about my father — and growing up in …
A Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad train went off the tracks near the small village of Heimdal, N.D., just east of Harvey, N.D., about 7:30 this morning. That’s not news any more, since the train was pulling 109 tank cars of oil, and when six of them caught on fire, it made national news pretty quickly because it’s just the …
Let me start with this. I was sitting in my recliner last Sunday evening watching a rerun of the old Lawrence Welk show from the 1960s. It was one of Lawrence‘s “theme shows,” and the theme this week was Los Angeles. As the show neared an end, after renditions of surfer songs and Hollywood movie themes, the band and singers …
Here’s an updated version of a story I wrote here a month or so — and for Dakota Country magazine’s current issue. Now we know that there will be no bighorn sheep season in North Dakota this year, for the first time since 1983. Nor will there be one in the foreseeable future. So, add bighorn sheep to the list …
326,170 Minnesotans live within half-mile danger zone of Bakken oil trains Transporting oil by rail cars is risky business because North Dakota oil is highly flammable and explosive. Those oil cars cruise past 6 percent of Minnesota’s residents, who live within a half-mile of rail routes carrying crude oil ; a half-mile is considered the evacuation danger zone. Five to seven trains …
Oil rig activity plunges on the Bakken A top state official says North Dakota could lose as many as 4,000 oil field jobs as production plunges towards 1 million barrels per day, the lowest level since February 2009. The rig count — 193 a year ago — could drop to 100 this year. http://www.startribune.com/business/296155211.html Big oil’s business model is broken Michael Klare …
North Dakota’s oil boom was built on the back of lax regulation of the oil industry. Period. When Jack Dalrymple takes credit for the oil boom, let’s remind him: The train that blew up in West Virginia on Monday did not have to blow up. It could have derailed without blowing up. It’s easy to blame the railroad — they …
If I were a North Dakota Democrat, here’s what I would say to my fellow party members: I turned on the Rachel Maddow show last night and, as usual, she had her headlights on bright, and the deer in those headlights was a young North Dakota Democratic-NPL legislator named Corey Mock. The subject was the 3-million barrel saltwater spill in …