TransCanada has applied for new permits from the Army Corps of Engineers and state agencies to build its proposed Keystone XL pipeline across over 1,000 U.S. waterways, including the Missouri, Niobrara, and Keya Paha rivers in Nebraska. [1]
The pipeline would imperil the drinking water of Tribal, rural, and urban communities — including the city of Omaha — that rely on the Missouri River, as well as the precious Ogallala aquifer, which provides water that irrigates one-third of our nation’s crops.
This move by TransCanada to apply for new permits comes after indigenous, landowner, and environmental groups including Bold successfully sued to stop the company’s illegal use of a blanket “Nationwide Permit 12” to fast-track authorization of Keystone XL construction through all 1,000+ water crossings. [2]
The Army Corps and state agencies are now accepting public comments on TransCanada’s new water permit application until Sept. 13, 2020. (Public hearings are also expected to be scheduled in late September or October, details to come). [3]
I traveled to Billings, Montana today to stand in solidarity with landowners, Tribal Nations, and Water Protectors at a rally before the one and only public hearing being held by the U.S. State Department on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
Unfortunately, unlike the historic 2013 State Dept. hearing on KXL in Grand Island, Nebraska — where over 1,000 Pipeline Fighters turned out, and hundreds gave public testimony in front of their fellow neighbors and citizens for nearly 12 hours — the scene here in Montana is a sad excuse for a public hearing, where citizens must instead speak their concerns privately one-by-one into a tape recorder, or else write them out to submit on paper.
Despite this attempt to silence the voices of Pipeline Fighters with no true “public hearing,” it’s still crucial that we speak out.
The best way you can make your voice heard right now is to submit a written comment into the State Department’s new draft environmental review of the pipeline. Public comments are due by Nov. 18th.
(Note: We encourage affected landowners living on the proposed KXL route to submit hand-written letters with your public comments on the pipeline directly to the State Department. Include docket number: DOS-2019-0033)
Mailing address: Ross Alliston, Keystone XL Program Manager
Office of Environmental Quality and Transboundary Issues
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
I’m proud to stand alongside Water Protectors here in Montana today, and will make sure to relay all the concerns of landowners and Pipeline Fighters from back home in Nebraska when I speak directly to State Department officials at the hearing.
A solemn message to the residents of Hoyt Lakes, Aurora, Meadowlands, Floodwood, Brookston, Cloquet, Scanlon, Carlton, Thomson, Wrenshall, Duluth, Superior WI, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Canada and most of all, Lake Superior, please seriously heed the warnings in the message below.
Even state-of-the-art mine tailings ponds that use earthen dam walls (especially if they are intended to grow to become 250 feet tall like PolyMet’s!!) are subject to sudden, unexpected – and very catastrophic – breaches that could easily destroy for a generation every living thing in the watershed downstream. Even tributaries can be contaminated and even destroyed in the sudden deluge that can reverse the flow of the creeks temporarily.
And be warned that foreign multinational mining corporations – just like every other profit-minded, multinational corporation that anybody can think of – has their profits as their number one goal; the long-term adverse environmental effects from their mining operations be damned!
Foreign multinational mining corporations have poisoned the environment – sometimes gradually, sometimes catastrophically – wherever on the planet they have extracted their minerals – NO EXCEPTIONS.
The giant multinational mining corporations Vale, BHP Billiton and Samarco (that have extensive operations in Brazil) have again demonstrated to the world why they can’t be trusted, for just yesterday (January 25, 2019) they have perpetrated another environmental catastrophe.
Read on and understand that similar disasters could (and probably will) happen downstream from the PolyMet/NorthMet/Glencore sulfuric acid-producing copper mine whose tailings pond dam is scheduled to rise to an eventually unstable height of 250 feet !!
Far more communities than the dozen towns named above could be devastated irreparably, despite what the starry-eyed and bamboozled (and/or paid off by political contributions) politicians like Senator Klobuchar, Senator Smith, US House member Stauber, ex-US House member Nolan, and practically every politician from either major political party that one can think of. The high potential for sudden environmental disasters similar to Samarco, Mount Polley (British Columbia) and now Brumadinho, Brazil (plus a hundred others since global mineral extractions by huge corporations began).
New analysis reveals that we have much less water in our aquifers than we previously thought — and the oil and gas industry could put that at even greater risk.
We’re living beyond our means when it comes to groundwater. That’s probably not news to everyone, but new research suggests that, deep underground in a number of key aquifers in some parts of the United States, we may have much less water than previously thought.
“We found that the average depth of water resources across the country was about half of what people had previously estimated,” says Jennifer McIntosh, a distinguished scholar and professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.
McIntosh and her colleagues — who published a new study about these aquifers in November in Environmental Research Letters — took a different approach to assessing groundwater than other research, which has used satellites to measure changes in groundwater storage. For example, a 2015 study looked at 37 major aquifers across the world and found some were being depleted faster than they were being replenished, including in California’s agriculturally intensive Central Valley.
McIntosh says those previous studies revealed a lot about how we’re depleting water resources from the top down through extraction, such as pumping for agriculture and water supplies, especially in places like California.
But McIntosh and three other researchers wanted to look at groundwater from a different perspective: They examined how we’re using water resources from the bottom up. More
“The closer a company injects fracking wastewater (and all the salts and pollutants that may come with it) to aquifers supplying freshwater for drinking and agriculture, the more likely those aquifers will be contaminated. In the recent University of Texas paper, researchers call out this increased likelihood in the country’s highest producing shale play, the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico.”
The first known oil well in Oklahoma happened by accident. It was 1859 and Lewis Ross was actually drilling for saltwater(brine), not oil. Brine was highly valued at the time for the salt that could be used to preserve meat. As Ross drilled deeper for brine, he hit oil. And people have been drilling for oil in Oklahoma ever since.
Lewis Ross might find today’s drilling landscape in the Sooner State somewhat ironic. The oil and gas industry, which has surging production due to horizontal drilling and fracking, is pumping out huge volumes of oil but even more brine. So much brine, in fact, that the fracking industry needs a way to dispose of the brine, or “produced water,” that comes out of oil and gas wells because it isn’t suitable for curing meats. In addition to salts, these wastewaters can contain naturally occurring radioactive elements and heavy metals.
But the industry’s preferred approaches for disposing of fracking wastewater — pumping it underground in either deep or shallow injection wells for long-term storage — both come with serious risks for nearby communities.
In Oklahoma, drillers primarily use deep injection wells for storing their wastewater from fracked shale wells, and while the state was producing the same amount of oil in 1985 as in 2015, something else has changed. The rise of the fracking industry in the central U.S. has coincided with a rise in earthquake activity.
From 1975 to 2008, Oklahoma averaged from one to three earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater a year. But by 2014, the state averaged 1.6 of these earthquakes a day. It now has a website that tracks them in real time.
Under a new Wyoming law, could journalists or documentary filmmakers who might document any future protests be charged under “aids or abets” with any “favorable” coverage of the group protesting, like the Standing Rock Sioux? What about new laws to charge oil companies who contaminate water with “ecoterrorism?”
On the heels of Iowa and Ohio, Wyoming has become the third state to introduce a bill criminalizing the type of activities undertaken by past oil and gas pipeline protesters.
One of the Wyoming bill’s co-sponsors even says it was inspired by the protests led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the Dakota Access pipeline, and a sheriff involved in policing those protests testified in support of the bill at a recent hearing. Wyoming’s bill is essentially a copy-paste version of template legislation produced by the conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Like the ALEC version, Wyoming’s Senate File 74 makes “impeding critical infrastructure … a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than ten (10) years, a fine of not more than one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000.00), or both.” Two of the bill sponsors of SF 74, Republican Sens. Eli Bebout and Nathan Winters, are ALEC members. SF 74 has passed unanimously out of its Senate Judiciary Committee and now moves onto the full floor.
ALEC‘s model bill, in turn, was based on two Oklahoma bills, HB 1123 and HB 2128. The Sooner State bills, now official state law, likewise impose felony sentencing, 10 years in prison, and/or a $100,000 fine on individuals who “willfully damage, destroy, vandalize, deface, or tamper with equipment in a critical infrastructure facility.” As DeSmog has reported, the Iowa bill has the lobbying support of Energy Transfer Partners — the owner of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) which runs through the state — as well as that of the American Petroleum Institute and other oil and gas industry companies.
ALEC brings together primarily Republican Party state legislators and lobbyists to enact and vote on “model” legislation at its meetings, which take place several times a year. Within different task forces at these meetings, corporate lobbyists can voice their support or critiques of bills, while also getting a vote. Those bills often then are introduced as legislation in statehouses nationwide, as in this latest example in Wyoming.
Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in Wyoming has helped the state vastly increase its natural gas production and spurred pipeline build-out. However, multiple studies in recent years have also linked fracking-related activities around the small town of Pavilion to groundwater contamination.
Wyoming’s bill, like the ALEC model bill and one of the Oklahoma bills, includes language implicating any organization “found to be a conspirator” and lobbing a $1 million fine on any group which “aids, abets, solicits, encourages, hires, conspires, commands, or procures a person to commit the crime of impeding critical infrastructure.”
State Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Leland Christensen, a Republican and one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said when he introduced the bill that legislative language was needed to hold accountable those “organizations that sponsor this kind of ecoterrorism.”
Requesting honest information from the Minnesota DNR, the Minnesota PCA and the US Forest Service regarding the latest PolyMet project permit application:
Please respond to the concerned folks to which this email has been cc’ed, all the details of the permit that the foreign corporation Glencore has submitted to the MNDNR, MNPCA, or US Forest Service concerning the establishment and maintainance of their enormously dangerous, potentially catastrophic, toxic tailings lagoon, an entity that seems to have been conveniently ignored by the media cheerleaders and even you regulatory entities.
I don’t recall seeing any permit application published for the eventual 250 foot high earthen dams that will hold back for eternity the tens of millions of cubic meters of poisonous liquid sludge that the copper/nickel/sulfuric acid mine will inevitably produce (and need to be stored).
Anybody with any awareness of the risks of the toxic metal and sulfuric acid recognizes that the tailings lagoon MUST be the center of discussion. So far it is rarely mentioned in the occasional news bulletins.
Every copper/nickel liquid tailings pond holds the 99.8% mine waste plus the liquids that is used to pipe the dissolved powder from the processing plant to the pond.
Every copper/nickel sulfide mine in the history of mining has leaked/leached poisons into the groundwater, onto adjacent lands and into the downstream environment. This happens at all copper mine sites that are located in watery environments such as northern Minnesota. More
Here are my reasons that the DNR should reject PolyMet’s permit applications for their earthen tailings dam, their liquid slurry pipeline pumping operation and their open pit sulfide mine near the headwaters of the St Louis River:
For starters, it is critically important to understand that the foreign Penny Stock company called PolyMet has a current share price of $0.63 per share, down from $1.50 per share in 2014. PolyMet, a total amateur in the business, has never operated a single mine in its short corporate life nor has it earned a single penny from mining. Their only income comes from selling shares to speculators and borrowing money from investors to pay their executives and employees. In addition, PolyMet, being an inanimate money-making corporation (that by definition has no conscience), cannot be trusted to tell the public about all the risks to the environment (including wildlife, fish, water, soil and air) that their exploitation of the earth could generate.
Therefore PolyMet can be expected to hide the fact that their operations could easily cause a massive environmental catastrophe similar to what happened at Mount Polley, British Columbia in 2014 (carefully study the article further below for the frightening details). Mount Polley was a state of the art copper mining operation.
Every citizen stakeholder that is potentially adversely affected by PolyMet’s operatioin deserves to be fully informed by (theoretically) unbiased regulators such as the MN DNR about the potentially catastrophic risk to the water users who happen to live downstream from the massive tailings lagoon, whose (eventual) 250 foot high earthen dam is at a high risk of failing in some way or other sometime in the future, especially in the event of a large deluge of rain, an earthquake or a design flaw that could cause the earthen dam to dissolve, leak, over-top or structurally fail in some other way, including being damaged by sabotage. The risks will exist for eternity, since the toxic metals (see list below) in the lagoon will never degrade into non-toxic forms.
In addition, the vulnerable pipeline that will carry the toxic sludge from the processing plant to the slurry pond is at high risk of sabotage, with serious environmental contamination that could possibly be even worse than the bursting of a dirty frack oil pipeline such as could happen from the foreign pipeline company Enbridge as it transports dirty oil from the tar sands in Canada or from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. I don’t believe that PolyMet has dealt with the possibility of sabotage.
Up to this point, both PolyMet and Twin Metals (and all of the governmental agencies that have been involved in the approval process) have been seriously neglectful in educating the public about all the potential lethal dangers of either the pipeline or the massive amount of toxic liquids that will forever cause the deaths of any water bird that lands on the lake-like lagoon (a la Butte, Montana’s ever-lastingly poisonous mining tailings “pond” and the nearby defunct Berkeley open pit mine [now a toxic “lake”] that has had its water pumps shut down and is now nearly filled to the brim with poisonous water that has high levels of dissolved toxic metals and a pH approximating that of stomach acid!). More
After heeding our calls to provide more opportunities for the public to make our concerns heard about the Keystone XL tarsands export pipeline, the Nebraska Public Service Commission will hold a second “public meeting” tomorrow — Wednesday, June 7th (12:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.) in O’Neill, Nebraska. More
For many residents of Carter Road in Dimock, Pennsylvania, it’s been nearly a decade since their lives were turned upside down by the arrival of Cabot Oil and Gas, a company whose Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) wells were plagued by a series of spills and other problems linked to the area’s contamination of drinking water supplies.
With a new federal court ruling handed down late last Friday, a judge unwound a unanimous eight-person jury which had ordered Cabot to pay a total of $4.24 million over the contamination of two of those families’ drinking water wells. In a 58 page ruling, Magistrate Judge Martin C. Carlson discarded the jury’s verdict in Ely v. Cabot and ordered a new trial, extending the legal battle over one of the highest-profile and longest-running fracking-related water contamination cases in the country.
In his order, Judge Carlson chastised the plaintiff’s lawyers for “repeatedly inviting the jury to engage in unwarranted speculation” and wrote that, in his personal estimation, the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence to warrant the jury’s $4.24 million in damages. The original complaint for the case was filed in November 2009.
Nonetheless, Judge Carlson declined to throw out the lawsuit entirely, ordering Cabot to re-start settlement talks with the Ely and Hubert families. If those talks fail, the trial process will begin anew, extending the already years-long legal battle into months or even years to come.
“The judge heard the same case that the jury heard and the jury was unanimous,” Nolan Scott Ely, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “How can he take it upon himself to set aside their verdict? It’s outrageous.”
Retrials “Not as Rare”
Over time, Judge Carlson’s order noted, the plaintiffs’ legal complaints had been successfully winnowed down by Cabot, which was represented at trial by several lawyers from Norton Rose Fulbright, the tenth highest-grossing law firm in the world in 2016. The case now centers around a nuisance complaint.
Ely, whose background is in construction work, and his family and neighbors were represented at trial by a solo practitioner, Leslie Lewis, assisted by one other attorney. During one brief stint in the years leading up to the trial, the two families had no lawyer at all, but represented themselves. When the case began, they had the assistance of the firms Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik & Associates and the Jacob Fuchsberg Law Firm (the former employer of Lewis), which ushered in a settlement agreement with some of the 44 original plaintiffs.
But Ely and others were not satisfied with the offer, which included a non-disclosure agreement, and decided to proceed with the lawsuit.
John-Mark Stensvaag, an environmental law professor at the University of Iowa, said that orders to re-try cases “are not as rare as one might think.”
“This does not mean that the plaintiffs have no case,” he added, “it only means that, in [Judge Carlson’s] opinion, they have not presented a case justifying the jury’s verdict and should be given a second opportunity to present an adequate case.”
There’s little question that something is very wrong with the water on Carter Road, despite lingering questions in the legal battles centering around that contaminated water.
In 2016, shortly after the Elys and Huberts’ $4.24 million verdict, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report concluding that Dimock’s tainted waters carried dangerous levels of chemicals including arsenic, lithium, and 4-chlorophenyl phenyl ether (which is acutely toxic if swallowed). Further, the water was laced with enough methane that five of the homes on Carter Road had been at risk of exploding. Indeed, on New Year’s Day 2009, one of Dimock’s contaminated drinking water wells did explode.
“Northern Minnesotans, Native American Water Protectors ( like the heroes at Standing Rock), sportsmen, environmentalists, downstream businesses, wild rice harvesters, fish, game, birds and just plain working folks whose babies and other vulnerable beings with developing brains need non-toxic water to thrive or simply survive must understand that such relatively common catastrophes could destroy the aquifers in the BWCAW, Birch Lake, the Partridge River, the Embarrass River, the St. Louis River, the city of Duluth and ultimately, Lake Superior.”
Last year, Duluth News-Tribune published a Local News article with the title “EPA signals its support for final PolyMet review”.
The article ended with what I regard as an intentionally deceptive and woefully insufficient sentence: “Critics say the project is likely to taint downstream waters with acidic runoff”. More
I repeat, wild horses being driven to extinction by the BLM is the canary in the coal mine of what is happening on America’s public lands and to America’s water. – Debbie Coffey
In a time when California faces an historic drought, the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit has uncovered that state officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump billions of gallons of waste water into protected aquifers. Investigative Reporter Stephen Stock reports in a story that aired on November 14, 2014.
State officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump nearly three billion gallons of waste water into underground aquifers that could have been used for drinking water or irrigation.
Those aquifers are supposed to be off-limits to that kind of activity, protected by the EPA.
“It’s inexcusable,” said Hollin Kretzmann, at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco. “At (a) time when California is experiencing one of the worst droughts in history, we’re allowing oil companies to contaminate what could otherwise be very useful ground water resources for irrigation and for drinking. It’s possible these aquifers are now contaminated irreparably.”
California’s Department of Conservation’s Chief Deputy Director, Jason Marshall, told NBC Bay Area, “In multiple different places of the permitting process an error could have been made.”
“There have been past issues where permits were issued to operators that they shouldn’t be injecting into those zones and so we’re fixing that,” Marshall added.
In “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing operations, oil and gas companies use massive amounts of water to force the release of underground fossil fuels. The practice produces large amounts of waste water that must then be disposed of. More
Note: Every effort is being made to force the passage of the Keystone pipeline. This bill WILL NOT give the US any form of energy independence as all crude is slated to be shipped out of the country and into the global market. Upon completion, it will provide only 35-42 permanent jobs. This is a steep price to pay for land devastation, water contamination, spills, leaks and the dumping of toxic waste materials in Wisconsin and Minnesota. This pipeline will also violate private property rights.
As all of this oil is slated for shipment out of the country, it would have been more cost efficient for Keystone to run a line west through Canadian states to its west coast. But guess what! Canadians aren’t having it! Thats why Keystone is trying to invade the US and cause catastrophic damage here.
By the way: Even with the horrendous history of just the last four months involving spills, leaks, water contamination etc., listed in the article below……Keystone will NOT be liable for any spills, cleanup or damage to land and water here in the US.
Alberta, Canada is basically a petro state. Oil and gas production rule everything and it’s happening everywhere in the north of the province. Pipelines criss cross most of Alberta. As a result, leaks of wells, facilities and pipelines are a constant thing all over the province. More
The Senate is preparing to vote on the Keystone Pipeline. Mary Landreiu led the Democrats as she shilled for the pipeline. The trade off of course is, that the Democrats will ok the pipeline and Republicans will be caving in on immigration…..which of course will supply a really cheap labor force that can be exploited. Its a win! Win!
Michigan Department of Natural Resources, via Flickr
Oil in the Kalamazoo River on July 28, 2010, three days after an Enbridge pipeline burst, causing the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history. The spill was particularly difficult to clean up because some of the oil sank.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) estimates that the waters in 27% of the southern half of Minnesota have reached critical levels in nitrogen contamination and that overall 41% of all lakes and streams have far higher than accepted and so-called “safe levels” of nitrogen contamination in addition to atrazine and glysophate contamination.
Industrialized corporate farming Chemical Footprints
Our family farms have virtually disappeared. In their place are massive, squalid industrial farming and ranching operations. The result of this industrialization is low quality food contaminated with vaccines, hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides and hundreds, if not thousands of chemicals we are not even allowed to know about.
The conversion, predominately over the last thirty years, from traditional farming to chemical farming is devastating the land and water, especially in agricultural states such as those in the mid-west. The result is chemical contamination and toxicity of land and water, now reaching critical levels and accumulating in our rivers and streams. Many of these same rivers and streams are emptying into the Mississippi, Cedar and Missouri Rivers and end up in the Gulf of Mexico contributing to the “dead zone”; an oxygen depleted area in the Gulf where nothing grows or lives. This area is enlarging each year. Much of our historically productive agricultural land and our water is on the verge of being reduced to a chemical laden soup unfit for use.
While the carping continues by vested interests regarding our so-called carbon footprints, and while the government continues its already debunked “global warming” scam, may be its time someone looked into the toxic chemical footprint being imprinted on our land and in our water by industrialized corporate farming. The promises of bigger more valuable crops, capable of feeding the world have been dismissed as the reality of agricultural monopolies protected by government, produce less than desirable crops, severely lacking in nutritional value. More
There is a landfill planned in Texas, near many horse rescues and where horses (and their humans) depend on clean groundwater. Please sign this petition, started by Tobi Kosanke, on Change.org:
Tobi Kosanke wrote this: At today’s Commissioner’s Court meeting, Commissioners Sylvia Cedillo and Otis Styers voted to sue the TCEQ for not recognizing Waller County's ordinance against landfills, including the Pintail landfill. Judge Beckendorff and Commissioners Kitzman and Podluka voted to amend the ordinance to permit the Pintail landfill, dealing a crushing blow to the health and economy of Hempstead and the surrounding Waller County area. In response, Commissioners Cedillo and Styers resigned. It was gut-wrenching to watch citizen after citizen after citizen stand up and plead with the Commission to support the ordinance and their constituents, only to witness our elected officials support the landfill company instead.
That this can happen in America is astounding. We expect the people we vote into office to represent us, their constituents. In this case, the constituents overwhelmingly demanded, pleaded, begged and insisted that the Commissioners vote to insure that this landfill not be built. But our local officials acted like dictators and voted against the health and financial well being of the people who elected them. More
BLM overlooks arsenic & mercury, but gets rid of wild horses
In 2010, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) gave the green light to the expansion of a mining project within the Triple B Herd Management Area (HMA) in Nevada, even knowing about mercury in the watershed and higher levels of arsenic in the surface water. Since grazing allotments seem to be in the hydrographic basin with “mercury deposition contributions to the watershed,” this would seem to put human food and health at risk. The BLM turned a blind eye and approved this project, and now they’re falling all over themselves to declare there’s not enough water for the wild horses because of “drought” and they now plan to waste taxpayer dollars on water trapping, and later helicopter roundups, to remove the wild horses.
But you can’t say they’re not rosy optimists. In the 2009 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Bald Mountain Mine (the mining project given approval to expand operations), under Surface Water, BLM states:
“In general, established background water quality levels are good with the exception of arsenic, which exceeds the 0.05 mg/l Nevada water quality standard.”
In other words, the water quality is good, except for all the arsenic, which is higher than a safe level. How much does it exceed the Nevada water quality standard?
It kind of makes you wonder if part of the BLM’s hurry to remove wild horses is to avoid having a bunch of horses drop dead in a pile somewhere from water contamination. Not that the BLM would care about the horses, but they wouldn’t want anything to further damage their poor (and continually plummeting) public image.
It seems that BLM’s idea of a “thriving ecological balance” and concern about “degradation to the range” is very selective. The only thing “green” about this is the money that’s being raked in while public lands are being raped. Again, the BLM has asked for public comments, which again, they will ignore. My comment about their latest plan to get rid of the wild horses is: More
(You might question the BLM’s project title after reading below. There’s nothing resilient or healthy about it. And not to malign BLM employees at local Field Offices – public lands planning comes from the President, Congress, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and BLM Director Bob Abbey.)
Department of Interior
Bureau of Land Management
Carson City District
Stillwater Field Office
5665 Morgan Mill Road
Carson City, Nevada 89701
desatoyaEA@blm.gov
BLM’s statements in the Environmental Assessment (EA) are italicized, and author’s comments are not italicized.
Introduction “The project area encompasses approximately 230,000 acres, which includes …136,400 acres of the Desatoya Herd Management Area (HMA) (84% of the HMA).”
The Desatoya HMA is about 161,000 acres, and the BLM is only leaving 127-180 wild horses on the HMA that is primarily for their use. That is only one horse every
1,267.7 acres – one horse every 894.4 acres.
If there is not enough water or forage for the wild horses, this can only be from misappropriation of land uses allowed and facilitated by the BLM, which is mismanagement. When did the BLM last monitor the HMA for carrying capacity? Please send me documents related to any recent monitoring.
“Within the project area, up to approximately 32,705 acres of ground disturbing treatments are proposed over a ten year period including…herbicide treatment… Page 83 – In fact, 2,4-D has limited residual activity (2 weeks); therefore any incidental contamination risk to non-target plants would likely be negligible.”
When considering plants, animals, water and humans, note that:
The EPA says that 2,4-D is seventh largest source of dioxin in the U.S.
Dioxin DCDD that contaminates 2,4-D herbicide is not tested, measured or monitored by the EPA, or even regulated. A Canadian research paper states that dioxin DCDD may have large public health implications due to its prevalence in our food and environment.
I diagnose dental fluorosis on average 5 times daily, but fluoride doesn’t only affect teeth, it can potentially affect the brain and nervous system, kidneys, bones, and other tissues in young children during their critical stages of organ development. A public awareness campaign is urgently needed
____________________________________________
A new study confirms infants fed formula reconstituted with fluoridated water are at greater risk of developing discolored teeth (dental fluorosis). (1) The American Dental Association (ADA) warned dentists about this in 2006 but has done little or nothing to inform the nearly 200 million Americans who live in communities with fluoridated drinking water. More
Now if the BLM used half way humane methods of rounding up horses, perhaps we all wouldn’t have sat up and noticed and gotten this outraged. Using a contractor that has been convicted of killing wild horses? Using Walmart bag whip sticks instead of natural horsemanship? Stuffing scared wild horses in trucks and driving them for hours right after they ran for miles and miles? Rounding them up in the middle of foaling season, in the middle of extreme temperatures?
From the highway it is a beautiful sight. A giant blue lake, with greenery all around and the desert mountains behind it in the stark blue summer sky. Its hard to take your eyes off of the scenery, so be careful driving. Far off in the distance you can barely make out some moving dots next to the lake. They are easily mistaken for a large herd of cows, many blacks and some whites and greys. But they are definitely not cows, they are a most magnificent herd of wild and free roaming horses living in a most spectacular peace of nature, still untouched by man.
Kudo, (founder of Animal Recovery Mission in Miami, working to close the horrendous illegal slaughter farms there) and myself, (founder of Respect4horses in Arizona), have decided to temporarily veer off of our main courses a bit to join forces and go document the wild horse roundups in Twin Peaks, CA. As we are driving on the road towards Fallon, where we want to visit the broken arrow holding facility, we noticed the lake and the dots along side of it and we decide to turn around, just to check in case they might be horses. I am so glad that we did. More
Ohio’s Love Canal: Toxic Pollution Dumping on a Scale of BP-Gulf Spill
By David Michael
Human illnesses and animal deaths have occurred recently from neurotoxins secreted by a heavy slime of blue and green algae floating on Ohio’s largest lake—Grand Lake St. Mary’s (Grand Lake) in Auglaize County. This is a lake that has been deteriorating for decades, but especially so in the past 10 years as factory farms have sprung up all over the area, and more are being built.
A high concentration of factory farms and the application of composted manure from CAFO (confined animal feeding operations) manure and sewage treatment sludge (humanure, now called biosolids—a mixture of concentrated human excrement and industrial discharges) is spreading toxic and infectious substances on farmlands close by and in the watershed. CAFOs in the watershed area account for 3 million chickens; while sewage sludge spreading is permitted on 8800 Ohio farmlands—several close to the edge of Grand Lake. More
By Debbie Coffey Copyright 2010 All Rights Reserved.
“Bob Abbey, for his efforts, was promoted in 2009 and became the national Director of the BLM. The issue regarding Abbey firing a whistleblower was not raised during his confirmation hearing. Then, Secretary Ken Salazar also named Abbey interim Director of the Minerals Management Service, “the scandal-ridden agency responsible for the oversight of offshore drilling,” to oversee the cleanup of BP’s Gulf oil spill. “___________________________________
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who has been called “the godfather of Nevada’s casino-real estate-development nexus and hard rock mining,” nominated Bob Abbey to be the Director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
What did Bob Abbey do before he became Director of the BLM?
Well for one thing, as the Nevada State Director of the BLM, Bob Abbey illegally fired Earle Dixon in 2004 for whistleblowing about radioactive uranium contamination from a mine in Nevada.
Earle Dixon, a mine hydrogeology specialist, was the Project Manager overseeing the cleanup of the Yerington Mine at the edge of Yerington in western Nevada. The Anaconda Copper Co. had mined and processed copper ore at this 3,500 acre site for more than 25 years. The site was bought by a subsidiary of BP (British Petroleum): ARCO (formerly called Atlantic Richfield). The cleanup included contaminated groundwater, metal-contaminated mine tailings and radioactive evaporation ponds. Dixon was trying to protect the health and safety of the cleanup workers and local residents, as well as make sure that the mine cleanup complied with the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, and other laws. Bob Abbey wrote a letter firing Dixon because he “alienated many of the groups that we, as an agency responsible for managing public lands, need to deal with in accomplishing our mission in an efficient and effective manner.” More
“Scientists warned that as the Great Basin’s groundwater is drained, desert springs and seeps will dry up, farms and ranches will wither away, and plants and wildlife will die off. The aquifer, which took millennia to fill, will run out.”
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If you read the article “The Mining of Our Aquifers” you may have wondered how the Mining Law of 1872 could be the most current law to regulate the mining industry and its disastrous effects on our aquifers and land.
According to the article “Harry Reid, Gold Member: Is our Senator in bed with America’s worst polluter?” by Josh Harkinson, “Reid has been instrumental in blocking efforts to reform the archaic General Mining Law of 1872, a legal blank check that has allowed miners to take an estimated $408 billion worth of gold and other hard rock minerals from public lands without paying a single cent in royalties – ever. More
Political Mischaracterization of Fluoridation Opposition Dismays Scientists
CANTON, N.Y., June 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Scientists representing the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) strongly object to recent mischaracterizations of fluoridation opponents by political pundits Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and others in conjunction with Senator Harry Reid’s Nevada re-election campaign.
“Fluoridation opposition is science-based and growing,” says Paul Connett, PhD, FAN Executive Director, who has co-authored the upcoming book, “The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics that Keep it There.” Co-authors are James Beck, MD, PhD, professor emeritus of medical physics at the University of Alberta in Calgary; and Spedding Micklem, DPhil, professor emeritus at Edinburgh University.
“We have spent many years investigating water fluoridation and the toxicity of fluoride and we are dismayed that commentators are willing to repeat, without verification, pro-fluoridation statements that disparage scientists and citizens who oppose the practice,” says Connett.
“FAN’s website http://www.FluorideAlert.org has a wealth of scientific information indicating that water fluoridation is neither safe nor effective,” says Connett. “In fact, mounting evidence shows that it is harmful to large segments of the population and has helped to create an epidemic of dental fluorosis in children.” On April 12, 2010, Time magazine listed fluoride as one of the “Top Ten Common Household Toxins” and described fluoride as both “neurotoxic and potentially tumorigenic if swallowed.” More
By JEFF DONN, MARTHA MENDOZA and JUSTIN PRITCHARD, Associated Press
U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.
Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking: For example, lithium is used to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder; nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives; copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.
Federal and industry officials say they don’t know the extent to which pharmaceuticals are released by U.S. manufacturers because no one tracks them — as drugs. But a close analysis of 20 years of federal records found that, in fact, the government unintentionally keeps data on a few, allowing a glimpse of the pharmaceuticals coming from factories.
As part of its ongoing PharmaWater investigation about trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water, AP identified 22 compounds that show up on two lists: the EPA monitors them as industrial chemicals that are released into rivers, lakes and other bodies of water under federal pollution laws, while the Food and Drug Administration classifies them as active pharmaceutical ingredients.
The data don’t show precisely how much of the 271 million pounds comes from drugmakers versus other manufacturers; also, the figure is a massive undercount because of the limited federal government tracking.
To date, drugmakers have dismissed the suggestion that their manufacturing contributes significantly to what’s being found in water. Federal drug and water regulators agree.
But some researchers say the lack of required testing amounts to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy about whether drugmakers are contributing to water pollution. READ MORE
: Between October and December 1995, the U.S. Army’s Depleted Uranium (DU) Project completed a series of training videos and manuals about depleted uranium munitions. This training regimen was developed as the result of recommendations made in the January 1993 General Accounting Office (GAO) report, “Army Not Adequately More..Prepared to Deal with Depleted Uranium Contamination.”
The training materials were intended to instruct servicemen and women about the use and hazards of depleted uranium munitions. In addition, the training regimen included instructions for soldiers who repair and recover vehicles contaminated by depleted uranium.
Throughout 1996, these videos sat on a shelf, while U.S. soldiers continued to use and work with depleted uranium munitions. In June 1997, Bernard Rostker, The Department of Defense (DoD) principle spokesperson for their investigation of Gulf War hazardous exposures, stated that the depleted uranium safety training program would begin to be shared by a limited number of servicemen and women in July 1997.
STILL TODAY the vast majority of servicemen and women in the U.S. military, and likely in the armed forces of other countries which are developing or have obtained depleted uranium munitions, are unaware of the use and dangers of depleted uranium munitions, or of the protective clothing and procedures which can minimize or prevent serious short-term exposures.
View the military hazard training film on depleted Uranium
The PPJ Gazette 