Morton County Sherriff’s Office clears up inaccuracies surrounding tear gas rumors

Last week, members of the ongoing Dakota Access pipeline protest claimed that pipeline security officials employed the use of tear gas via an airplane to disperse the increasingly hostile crowd of protestors. This is simply not the case.

In a press release from the Morton County Sherriff’s department, the claim was easily debunked as the airplane in question was simply a crop dusting plane alerting a nearby helicopter to its location.

According to the sheriff’s office, “It is very important that our residents are aware that the aircraft in question was an agricultural spray plane (bi-plane) flying to a field to apply a product…protocol is to use vegetable oil (the same used in air shows) as a method to identify an aircraft in the area. What you see is the oil being burned off as it hits the exhaust; it is not a pesticide, nerve agent, or anything of the ilk.”

Yet again, the emotion of the ongoing opposition has caused misinformation to be widely circulated and accepted as fact.