Serial Bomber Stalking EnCana's Sour-Gas Network Of Wells & Pipelines In BC - G&M

[hatrack]

EDIT

On Oct. 7, 2008, someone walked into the Shoppers Drug Mart in Dawson Creek and mailed letters to several local media outlets, including the city’s Daily News. The letter, scrawled in a theatrically childish hand, demanded that Calgary-based EnCana and “all other oil and gas interests” close down their operations in the region and “leave the area until further notice.” The writer (or writers) accused the industry of “endangering our families with crazy expansion of deadly gas wells in our home lands.” Noon on Saturday, Oct. 11, was cited as the deadline for compliance. “At first, nobody paid much attention to the letter,” says Andrew Bergland, a reporter with the Daily News. “You get a lot of crazy mail in this business. In fact, the front desk didn’t even bother passing it on.”

Some time early Sunday morning, the bomber detonated an explosive device under an EnCana pipeline. “The cops came to our office, seized the letter and launched a big investigation,” says Bergland, “and in no time, everyone in the Peace River region was talking about this mysterious bomber who’d declared war on EnCana. These pipelines carry highly explosive natural gas, plus hydrogen sulphide, which is creepy stuff. So the bombing got a lot of people worried.”

Over the next nine months, the bomber sent no more letters and let his bombs do the talking, with five more attacks, the final two of which were the most daring and dangerous. On July 1, an explosion blew a wellhead in a wooded area south of Dawson Creek. Three days later, the saboteur slipped into a fenced, fully lit EnCana compressor yard, only 400 metres away from the roaring well-fire, and set off another bomb, this one so powerful that residents heard it for miles around. At that point, the bomber got in touch again. Another letter to the Dawson Creek Daily News warned EnCana that “you simply can’t win this fight,” and informed the company that all action against it would cease for three months. If the company hadn’t retreated by then, things would “get a lot worse for you and your terrorist pals in the oil and gas business.”

The pipeline attacks immediately brought to mind the sabotage campaign of Wiebo Ludwig, who, in the late 1990s, waged war against the oil and gas industry in northwestern Alberta. The similarities between Ludwig’s battle—which also involved bombings and other vandalism of oil and gas wells—and the EnCana incidents were obvious, but the RCMP soon dismissed him as a suspect. That has left them, however, with only a vague profile of the bomber: someone who knows his way around the bush and is handy with construction materials and explosives—a description that fits a significant percentage of the residents of Northern B.C. One RCMP theory has focused on the small community of Tomslake, south of Dawson Creek; the reference to “home lands” suggests the malefactor might be a member of the town’s Czech immigrant community, who sometimes use the term to describe the area. But some argue that the investigators could be producing red herrings for their own strategic reasons. (It wouldn’t be the first time that the RCMP has entertained the audience with sleight of hand. During the convoluted Ludwig investigation, it turned out that one of the bombings was carried out by the Mounties themselves.)

EDIT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/encanas-ticking-timebomb/article1298872/

[applegrove]

1. The man accused was interviewed on TV about the bombings. He is an attention hound.

There will be much in the way of theatrics to come.

[OnlinePoker]

2. Questioned, Not accused

He hasn't been charged with anything yet. He was just questioned by the RCMP in relation to the crime. The way he talks in interviews, though, one would suspect he at least knows what's going on.