Terry Van Housen, a 64-year-old married father of two, said if the groundwater underneath his farm and his 10,000-head cattle feedlot near Stromsburg were contaminated by an oil spill, he’d be ruined.

“The water source right underneath of us is our living,” Van Housen said. “Going to jail, or getting in front of a bunch of people and telling them what I think, I would do anything like that.”

Law enforcement and county officials interviewed say there have been some discussions about what might be coming, but they declined to say whether any protest-control training is underway.

Taylor Gage, a spokesman for Gov. Pete Ricketts, said that commenting on such security preparations would “jeopardize” those plans.

The Nebraska State Patrol is well aware of what happened in North Dakota, patrol spokesman Mike Meyer wrote in an email, and regularly trains for “contingencies” such as protests and natural disasters.

Meyer said that recent purchases by the patrol of the sort of nonlethal devices used in crowd control — such as impact sponges and rubber-ball blast and pepper spray grenades — were not out of the ordinary, and are part of the agency’s regular equipment purchases.