Megaloads Opponents May Be in the Driver’s Seat
As Imperial Oil seeks trucking routes aside from Highway 12, victory for the underdogs could be at hand.
Against all odds, a swarming legal strategy that has produced more individual defeats than victories seems to have placed the opponents of oversized oil equipment shipments on Highway 12 in the driver’s seat.
ExxonMobil, whose subsidiary, Imperial Oil, has been attempting to gain court permission to truck about 200 so-called megaloads along the pristine byway through Idaho and Montana en route to the Kearl Oil Sands development in Canada, announced Monday that it is pursuing alternative routes for shipment of smaller modules.
The statement was not a surprise. In a contested case hearing in Boise in May, Kearl project manager Ken Johnson testified that 60 of the modules could be shipped from Korea to the Port of Vancouver for trucking to Alberta, because they would be small enough to fit under existing highway overpasses.
Johnson said 33 of the remaining larger modules were being disassembled in Lewiston to send them by another route to Alberta. Simply put, they were being cut in half at a cost of $500,000 per module, he testified.
fightinggoliath.org/Pages/specialaboutHwy.12.html
And here is the Bill of Rights Defense Committee's website. Well worth a serious look...www.bordc.org/
- KBOO