AIM & DGR Colorado Protest Suncor

This past New Year’s Eve, activists from the American Indian Movement and Deep Green Resistance Colorado organized a protest in Denver to raise awareness about the chronic negligence, pollution and general evil of Suncor Energy and it’s oil refinery in Commerce City, Colorado. We hooked up with members of Occupy Denver and marched down the 16th Street Mall, before hearing from members of AIM, DGR Colorado, and members of neighborhood in which the refinery is located.

The media coverage was surprisingly good (and honest). Check out DGR Colorado’s own Deanna Meyer on 9 News!

Some background on the spill:

Way back in November of 2011, the Suncor oil refinery is Commerce City, Colorado had an underground pipe rupture. The result was an oil ‘seep’, in which an unknown quantity of petroleum product saturated the ground, before flowing a quarter-mile underneath a water treatment plant and out into Sand Creek. A fisherman in the Creek was the first to notice the spill; the smell was unbearable and his eyes watered from being near it! The Colorado Department of Health later verified that the levels of benzene — a poisonous and carcinogenic chemical — were at least 400 times greater than safe concentrations (and this number is undoubtedly low).  There’s so much oil in the ground that workers at the wastewater treatment plant (which supplies drinking water for Denver neighborhoods) now must wear gas masks to go to work, and Suncor is performing secret benzene-blood tests on its employees.

But if there’s to be anything resembling a living world or healthy communities along the Front Range, we don’t just need Suncor to clean up after itself; we need Suncor shut down for good! This refinery has been spilling oil in the ground, poisoning the air, killing the water and destroying human and nonhuman communities for almost a century! And now, Suncor is using it to refine its “blood-fortified” oil from the Athabasca tar sands!

A just, healthy, living world IS possible, but not with Suncor in it.