Hundreds of protestors massed on Spokane Street early Monday, May 19 to protest the plans by Shell Oil to drill in the Arctic Ocean this summer using the Polar Pioneer exploratory drilling rig that arrived at Seattle's Terminal 5 last week. In a made for media event, camera crews and reporters, photographers and others joined what appeared to be well over 700 people who first massed on Spokane Street near the Duwamish Channel fishing dock.

The group had no formal leader but various people spoke to the crowd through a portable public address system that also played environmentally themed music. The crowd was told their legal rights and told to write down a legal help phone number on their arms in the event they were arrested.

Shortly after 7am the crowd was told to march by one of the organizers and they moved en masse to head west, taking over the roadway on the lower Spokane Street Bridge, It was non violent, and aside from stopping traffic on the bridge, law abiding. Shouting slogans and rhymes, the group, took a right at the truck overpass and moved down into the entrance to Terminal 5, effectively blocking all traffic into or out of the facility.

Allison Warden a native American of the Inupiat people of Kaktovi, Alaska, a town of under 300 people on the north shore of Barter Island, between the Okpilak and Jago rivers on the Beaufort Sea coast led the march. She spoke about why she was there noting that if an oil spill occurred there it would destroy the way of life for her town and others. "The Arctic is not like the waters here in Seattle. It's much more fragile. If an oil spill occurred it could become trapped under the ice and becme a very challenging situation we've never seen before."

Various speakers addressed the crowd including Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Councilmember all echoing a similar theme of opposition to Shell's plans to drill exploratory wells in Alaska's Chukchi Sea.