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The face of tar sands resistance in the Northwest" appeared again on Monday when 16 people were arrested in Oregon after blockading a "megaload" of equipment on its way to the Athabasca oil fields in Alberta, Canada.
Organizers with the climate activism group Portland Rising Tide say protesters set up two blockade sites along Highway 26 near the town of John Day, locking themselves to disabled vehicles in front of the 376-foot long, 901,000-lb load carrying a heat exchanger to be used in tar sands extraction.
While the activists succeeded in at least temporarily halting the transport of equipment, Portland Rising Tide says police used "pain compliance to extract" the four protesters who had locked themselves to the two vehicles, and aggressively arrested others "who were actively trying not to obstruct the load or police activity."
Among the arrested were the group's photographers and videographers.
"Transporting loads of such sizes presents a huge threat to rural Oregon's roads, and rivers," said Nicole Brown, who grew up in Eastern Oregon and was present at the actions last night. "Law enforcement should focus on protecting Oregon's roads and rivers and people, rather than multinational fossil fuel interests."
Portland Rising Tide says that a similar megaload toppled last week in Gladstone, Ore., blocking part of I-205 for hours.
"Are they creating jobs in our communities? No, they want to extract the dirtiest oil in the world and send it overseas at the expense of communities and the climate," Brown stated.
Weather, mountain roads and protests have already slowed down the megaload's travel. It now heads east into Idaho and then into Montana before reaching the Alberta tar sands.
It is the first of three megaloads scheduled to pass through Oregon.
Monday's blockade follows a similar action earlier in the month, when Rising Tide activists and Umatilla tribal members blockaded a megaload of tar sands equipment near the Port of Umatilla in Oregon. In August members of the Nez Perce tribe and others halted a similar megaload of equipment making its way along Idaho's Highway 12 to the Alberta tar sands fields.
Within the last two weeks, Portland Rising Tide has also occupied offices of megaload shipper Omega Morgan as well as the office of a General Electric subsidiary that makes equipment for what the group has called "the most destructive and outmoded, fossil fuel extraction undertaking on Earth: Alberta tar sands mining."
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