The tribe is appealing the one decision you linked to . Everything I ' ve seen has said all the tribes appeals have been denied and it ' s only the ACoE that wants to review some things . There is still an unresolved question about a violation of a treaty . The treaty issue was solved 148 years ago , the land the pipeline is on does not belong to the tribe . Pipeline spills are all too commonSome 20 odd spills a year for a system encompassing 72 , 000 miles of pipelineI did some math with the total amount of oil products spilled from pipelines in 2001 and got around 2 million gallons , for comparison the US ships nearly 3 billion gallons of oil a day . The odds of a spill happening at that exact halfmile stretch of pipe and enough of the pipes contents leaking out to cause a major issue are so insignificantly small as to not be worth worrying about . The people of the Standing Rock Sioux should be about as worried that they ' d all be struck by lightning as they should be about losing their water to a spill .