Saboteurs who blow up targets in the West are sometimes home-grown. One of the most notorious, Wiebo Ludwig, was in 2000 convicted and jailed for bombing an oil well in western Canada.
Last weekend, police questioned Ludwig over a series of pipeline explosions. The attacks have been costly for the pipeline's owner, EnCana, a large oil and gas producer that has offered a C$1 million (Dh3.54m) reward for information leading to the perpetrator's apprehension. On Saturday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Ludwig in relation to the bombings, only to release him the next day without charging him, his lawyer said. Their investigation continues, with the reward still unclaimed.
"He was released about 6am," Ludwig's lawyer, Paul Moreau, told Bloomberg on Sunday. "No charges were laid." The police said they had released a 68-year-old man from custody, without identifying him. The Peace district, where Ludwig has lived and farmed for the past quarter of a century, straddles Canada's two western-most provinces of Alberta and British Columbia and is the country's most northern agricultural region. In the past two decades it has also become one of Canada's most active gas-producing regions, as energy companies have pushed north to tap into reserves in ever more remote territory.
Ludwig, the bearded, 68-year-old patriarch of a reclusive Dutch immigrant farming clan, is also a discredited former Christian Reformed Church minister who was booted out of three parishes for excommunicating parishioners who disagreed with him. Amid the aspen forests of Alberta, he owns a backwoods compound named Trickle Creek Farm. The spread, at the end of a long unpaved road, houses an extended family that has grown over the years to about 50 blood relatives and in-laws.
Seminary professors who decades earlier tried to block Ludwig's ordination call the community a "cult". Since 1985, Ludwig has called it The Church of our Shepherd King. After moving to Alberta from Ontario and founding the church, the former firebrand preacher quickly developed a reputation for ruling his family with an iron fist. Ludwig's frequently pregnant wife Mamie once shocked locals by appearing bald-headed at the grocery store in the nearby village of Hythe.
"We thought when Mamie got pregnant she got her head shaved," said Doug Burdess, the shop's owner and manager. "We thought it was one of their rituals." As it turned out, Ludwig and the two close friends who had followed him to Trickle Creek, Richard Boonstra and Bill Schilthuis, disciplined the Trickle Creek women by shaving their heads and banishing them from the family compound. The area's families grew to tolerate their eccentric neighbours. That was partly because they mainly kept to themselves, and also because the male members of the intermarried Ludwig-Boonstra-Schilthuis tribe provided high-quality plastering services.
But many of Hythe's residents were afraid of Ludwig, who lectured them on female subservience and righteous living, and local officials who tried to round up the home-schooled Trickle Creek youngsters for more formal education were run off the property. Fear turned to loathing in the mid-1990s, when oil and gas production in the region moved into full swing, Ludwig emerged as an implacable foe of the companies drilling on and around his land, and there were more than 150 cases of vandalism in the area.
Western Canadian farmers are ambivalent to the oil industry. On the one hand, the firms leasing mineral rights compensate land owners for the use of their property. Rig operators also hire seasonally unemployed farm workers. On the other hand, drilling is noisy, disruptive, and brings health, safety and environmental risks. Ludwig claimed gas wells were poisoning his land, while their emissions were causing his livestock and women to miscarry.
He was not the first Alberta farmer to voice such concerns. "We [farmers] were intervening to stop plants and wells before the Ludwigs ever came here," said Richard Harpe, a local official. But instead of presenting evidence at regulatory hearings, Ludwig launched a direct-action campaign. First it was nails strewn on access roads to well sites. Next some of the Trickle Creek women tied themselves to a gate. Then rifle shots were fired into gas plants. One summer weekend in 1998, two oil wells were blown up.
"Everyone was just terrified. It got so, if you saw a strange vehicle driving around, you would phone the police," said Mr Harpe. The next year, something definitive happened at Trickle Creek Farm: a group of thrill-seeking youngsters drove on to Ludwig's land at the dead of night and caused a ruckus. Shots were fired and a bullet hit Karman Willis, 16, in the chest, killing her. The Ludwigs maintained that none of them knew the gunman's identity, and no one was charged with Ms Willis's death, but the neighbouring communities' uneasiness about the family turned to outright hostility.
In 2000, Ludwig was convicted and jailed for one of the well bombings. He was released less than two years later, having served two thirds of his sentence. The vandalism stopped as soon as Ludwig went to jail. In 2008, however, a new rash of Peace district bombings broke out. Last October, Ludwig spoke out against the incidents near Dawson Creek in British Columbia, but said he understood the bomber and his frustrations. "I've been there. I've wanted to do terrible things to the industry because of what was happening to us here - not because I wanted to pay them back, but to stop them somehow because they wouldn't listen," he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
"I want to encourage you not to let anger about such stupidity get the best of you and to realise that these conflicts cannot ultimately be settled by use of force," he added in an open letter to the pipeline bomber. "You need to know that you have already set a lot of good things in motion. You've truly woken a lot of people up and stimulated some very valuable discussion." @Email:tcarlisle@thenational.ae
