A Pontoon Ride Reveals How 1.4 Million Gallons of Drilling Mud Disappeared Under the Missouri River

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Eco Files friends! I have been head-down trying to bust out the rest of our podcast, SLAPP’d, all month. Now we’re over halfway through, and I’m going to take a tiny break —like an actual weekend. I hope you’re doing the same — even if what you actually need is a break from America. But before I do, I want to tell you about this latest episode, and encourage you to pop it on your stereo as you drive outa town.

Episode 4: Back to the Water is good for this weekend, because it’s a kind of break, too. We leave the courtroom drama entirely, and spend most of the episode on a pontoon ride. This series so far has focused primarily on the massive lawsuit the parent company of the Dakota Access Pipeline filed against Greenpeace.

• Episode 1: How did we get here? honed in on the backstory of Cody Hall, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who was named in the lawsuit and lived with it hanging over his head for the better part of a decade — until he was quietly removed from the case.

• Episode 2: The Trial Begins was all about jury selection as well as the backstory of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, the law firm representing Energy Transfer.

• And Episode 3: The Charge is a deep dive into the legal drama of the trial — and my growing realization that the pipeline company has no smoking gun proving its case against Greenpeace.

But Episode 4 is a departure from all that. The pipeline company’s lawsuit was a retelling of the story of the Standing Rock movement — it offered up a narrative to replace that of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. But as I reported out this story, despite all the smoke and mirrors, I found myself irresistibly pulled back to the heart of what this fight was always about for the Standing Rock nation: the Missouri River.

Standing Rock’s water guy, Doug Crow Ghost, was kind enough to invite me to join him and a team of emergency managers, a local reporter, and an elected official out onto the river, where he told me about the longer-running fight to protect the water. I learned about the dams that flooded out entire communities, and that Doug says the Army Corps of Engineers mismanages to this day.

The emergency managers who were with us, Erika Porter and Harold Tiger, told me about the wildfires they had just got done fighting (and which I had seen firsthand) and about the impacts of the climate crisis on Standing Rock.

And we parked the boat on top of the spot where the Dakota Access Pipeline crosses under the river, where Doug told me about this report that was made public through the Greenpeace case. It said that there were problems when Energy Transfer’s contractor was drilling under the river, and 1.4 million gallons of drilling mud mysteriously disappeared into the hole they'd created. Drilled actually had an expert review that report about the drilling mud. His words: “I cannot reiterate enough that the mud went somewhere. It does not just disappear.” But we don’t know where it went. (You can find the text of the report at the bottom of this article.)

Standing Rock tackled all these issues in a lawsuit they filed last October. It was dismissed, but they’ve appealed.

Our boat journey underlined for me how Standing Rock and other Indigenous nations along the Missouri River really never have stopped fighting all these years, ever since America happened to them, even when things were the grimmest.

Toward the end of the pontoon ride, we got stuck in the mud. We did the only thing you can do in a situation like that. We jumped into the water and pushed.

Hope you'll listen to the episode :)

This link gets you right to it: https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled/12/s12-ep4

This one gets you to all the apps where you can play it: push.fm/fl/drilled