Not if she can help it...

We've told you about Eleanor Fairchild.  She is the one who was arrested with Daryl Hannah, ON HER OWN PROPERTY.

Read the latest in the FW Weekly.  Don't think it can't happen to YOU or your great grandmother.  This is Texas, sadly, it happens every day.  Though this time it's a Canadian company taking her land.

“I called the soil conservation people at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but they said they had no jurisdiction. I called TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality), and they said they couldn’t do anything about erosion. I called the Railroad Commission, and they said they only gave out pipeline permits but have no jurisdiction over them. I called everybody — the Department of Transportation pipeline safety people, the Army Corps of Engineers — who gave the permit to TransCanada to cross my creek and got no response. Even the EPA said they couldn’t do anything until there is a spill.”

“I’ve learned that our government is not there to help us — not when you’re fighting the big guys,” she said. “I think I’ll be an activist for the rest of my life so that others don’t have to go through the same thing.”

WHO's land is it?

Find out in the FW Weekly. 

What will YOU do when they want yours?

But TransCanada wouldn’t do that. The firm, hired to move tar sands bitumen — a mix of sand, clay, and water saturated with an extremely dense petroleum — from Alberta, Canada, to the Houston refineries along what’s been dubbed the Keystone Pipeline XL, upped its offer on the easement a couple of times between 2008 and 2011 from $7,000 to $21,000. When the Crawfords continued to say they weren’t interested, TransCanada went ahead and condemned the land it wanted in September 2011.

Since then, the two parties have been in a legal wrestling match pitting the Crawfords — farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford, her younger brother and sister, and their dad — against a multinational billion-dollar corporation that claims the right to take, by eminent domain if necessary, any land they want to lay pipe on.

It’s the latest version of the David and Goliath story that has already affected thousands of Texans who’ve been steamrolled by the natural gas industry. But this version goes beyond the usual pipeline land-grabs, because it involves a company taking property years before it will obtain a permit to lay the pipe — a company that may not be in compliance with Texas law and therefore may not have the legal right to take anything.

Despite those questions, TransCanada has been involved in at least 89 eminent domain land seizures in Texas alone. The fight involves the issue of which government agency, if any, oversees pipeline companies and their use of eminent domain. Landowners are asking why there is nothing in state law to make a company show the need for a new pipeline before it is allowed to seize private lands — and why individual landowners are having to go to court to thrash out issues that they believe should be covered by state law and public policy.

It’s an issue that seems designed to make Texans, with their love of the land, stand up and shout for answers. But few have. Oil and gas companies, as well as the pipeline companies, generally get to do pretty much as they like here, and even the people who know they can fight also realize they have little chance against companies that can hire lawyers by the carload and drag out lawsuits for years.

In this state, pipeline companies have been turned down only once in more than a hundred years, in taking land by eminent domain. And perhaps the most difficult part of fighting the pipeline companies is that the moment they file to condemn your property through eminent domain, they are considered to own the easement that’s been condemned and have the right to begin laying pipe. That’s a tough hurdle even for a landowner with deep pockets.

The Crawfords are one of a handful of families trying to fight back. They simply don’t want any of their land used for an easement for a pipeline that could rupture and ruin Bois d’Arc Creek, one of their farm’s primary water sources. They don’t want the Caddo Indian artifacts that lie just beneath the surface disturbed. They don’t want to say “How high?” just because a company demands they jump for private profit. For the Crawfords, it’s not about getting a better financial settlement from TransCanada in exchange for allowing them to lay their pipe: It’s about principle.

How much does fuzzy math cost YOU?

Same story, different state.

An industry "study" includes made up job numbers.  Shocking!  Not.  What is shocking is a reporter actually got to the bottom of it.

Read about the Washington Post Keystone Pipeline bust here.

What is shocking is that we can somehow figure out how to run a dangerous pipeline across our great nation, but we can't figure out how to pipe water from the states that are flooding to those in a drought...huh.  How many jobs would that create?

In an explosive story posted online in the Washington Post this afternoon, pipeline company TransCanada admitted that it has grossly misrepresented the number of jobs the controversial Keystone XL project would create.

The 20,000 jobs involved in pipeline construction? A fabrication supported by misleading mathematics. The 250,000 indirect jobs? A number based on one oil-industry funded study that counted jobs for “dancers, choreographers and speech therapists,” according to the Post.

“Thank heavens some reporter actually questioned this jobs number, instead of just repeating it,” said Bill McKibben, who is leading a major protest against Keystone XL this Sunday at the White House. 

In fact, in the only jobs study not funded by TransCanada, the Cornell Global Labor Institute concluded that any jobs stemming from the pipeline’s construction were likely be outweighed by the environmental damage it caused, along with a possible rise in Midwest gasoline prices because a new pipeline would divert that region’s current oversupply of oil to the Gulf Coast.

Same song and dance

Any of this starting to sound familiar, yet?

Texas in the New York Times...again.  

Eminent Domain Fight Has a Canadian Twist

Randy Thompson, a Nebraska landowner, is challenging the assumption by TransCanada that it can seize land for an oil pipeline. 

 
 By LESLIE KAUFMAN and DAN FROSCH
    Published: October 17, 2011 

 A Canadian company has been threatening to confiscate private land from South Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, and is already suing many who have refused to allow the Keystone XL pipeline on their property even though the controversial project has yet to receive federal approval. 
 
Randy Thompson, a cattle buyer in Nebraska, was informed that if he did not grant pipeline access to 80 of the 400 acres left to him by his mother along the Platte River, "Keystone will use eminent domain to acquire the easement." 

Sue Kelso and her large extended family in Oklahoma were sued in the local district court by TransCanada, the pipeline company, after she and her siblings refused to allow the pipeline to cross their pasture. "Their land agent told us the very first day she met with us, you either take the money or they're going to condemn the land," Mrs. Kelso said. 

By its own count, the company currently has 34 eminent domain actions against landowners in Texas and an additional 22 in South Dakota. 

“It was a hard decision whether I wanted to fight and spend all this money even though I could lose the thing,” Ms. Fairchild said in a weary drawl. “But somebody needs to fight them. I decided it would be me.”