From: The New York Times
By SAUL ELBEIN
May 16, 2014
Terry
Van Housen had a question. What he wanted to know from the 30 or so
other Nebraska farmers and ranchers gathered in February at the York
Community Center was this: What do you do with 10,000 dead cows?
That
was the number of cattle Van Housen figured could be at risk if the
Obama administration permitted the proposed 1,700-mile XL leg of the
Keystone pipeline to cut across their state. Bulldozers would dig a
trench not far from Van Housen’s feedlot, completing the final phase of
the Keystone project and streamlining the current flow of oil from the
bitumen mines of Northern Alberta toward refineries on the Gulf Coast of
Texas. If the pipe were to leak, Van Housen said, his cattle could die.
“Can
we put [those cows] on trucks and send them to Canada?” suggested Max
Nelson, a stooped retired rancher who raised his hand every 10 minutes
to pose other hypothetical disasters: a spill polluting the water supply
of West Omaha, say, or compromising the hydroelectric dams on the
Platte River. MORE
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