"Court: Louisiana oil pipeline construction can continue", 6 July 2018

Construction of a crude oil pipeline through Louisiana’s environmentally fragile Atchafalaya Basin swamp can continue under a federal appeals court decision handed down Friday.  A divided panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking construction of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline.  The 2-1 decision was a victory for Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC, whose lawyers had urged the panel to throw out U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick’s injunction in April.  Dick issued a preliminary injunction in February stopping pipeline construction in the Atchafalaya Basin swamp until a lawsuit by project opponents is resolved...Dick concluded the project’s irreversible environmental damage outweighed the economic harm that a delay brought to the company...But Friday’s opinion...said Dick had “misperceived the applicable regulations,” and that the Corps’ environmental assessment was sufficient...