Three years after a court ruling blocked pending “megaload” shipments from using the scenic U.S. Highway 12 river corridor in north-central Idaho, the Idaho Transportation Department is looking to update its rules governing such oversized shipments, the Lewiston Tribune reports. In response to a 2013 federal court ruling and injunction, the U.S. Forest Service issued a report on the effects of megaloads on the “intrinsic and cultural values” of the river corridor, which includes a federally designated Wild and Scenic River corridor as well as tribal land, and said it would consult with the Nez Perce Tribe; the tribe and Idaho Rivers United filed the lawsuit that resulted in the injunction.

Now, the state is updating its rules for oversized loads to meet the new Forest Service criteria, writes Tribune reporter Bill Spence. Changes to the ITD rules include noting the Forest Service’s jurisdiction; prohibiting oversized loads from using turnouts intended for recreational vehicles; the possibility of other safety requirements including an ambulance or law enforcement escort, safety lighting and time-of-day travel restrictions; and a limit of one megaload traveling the section of highway at a time.

ITD will hold a public hearing Sept. 28 in Boise on the rule changes; people also can participate by video conference from ITD offices in Lewiston, Shoshone, Pocatello and Rigby. There’s more info online here; Spence’s full report is online here.

The new rules would apply to big loads on the Highway 12 corridor that are more than 16 feet wide or more than 150 feet long; that would require more than 12 hours to travel through the area; or that would require physical modification of the roadway or vegetation to pass through the corridor.

The 2011 lawsuit and other challenges prompted ExxonMobil to scrap plans to send a series of giant loads across the route, instead cutting them into smaller pieces so they could travel on alternate routes. In 2013, a giant load of General Electric equipment traveled across the route, drawing hundreds of protesters and resulting in more than two dozen arrests. The injunction stopped any further such shipments; the protested load was 255 feet long, 21 feet wide and weighed 644,000 pounds.

Imperial Oil, an Exxon-Mobil affiliate that unsuccessfully sought to move 200-plus megaloads of Korean-made oil field equipment over the scenic Idaho river corridor en route to the Canadian oil sands, began ordering equipment that’s locally manufactured in Alberta instead, the New Yorker reported in 2014.

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