From Matthew Schwartz one of our best environmentalists - South Florida Wildlands Association. I left a comment, so leave a damn comment too. It takes a few seconds. It takes longer to read this blog from Matthew. Big Cypress is going to get a lot smaller. We can start calling it Small Cypress if all these wacky people get their way. Here is what they want to do: I am more concise than Matthew:
by introducing an energy source to the subsurface and recording and analyzing the returning sound waves. Stratigraphic anomalies detected by this technique may become future targets for oil and gas exploration drilling.
Sorry for the last minute notice - lots on the plate of this little organization right now. But if you have a few minutes, the National Park Service is currently taking comments on an application by Burnett Oil of Ft. Worth, Texas, to conduct seismic testing across approximately 110 square miles or 70,000 acres of the Big Cypress National Preserve. The official website for comments is here
https://parkplanning.nps.gov/commentForm.cfm?documentID=66527
You will be commenting on the "NOBLES GRADE 3-D SEISMIC SURVEY PLAN OF OPERATIONS."
The above website will close at 2 AM on Monday morning (EST). So if this issue moves you - please act quickly. Individual comments that address the specifics of the operation under review and the anticipated impacts - no matter how brief - are the way to go here. The National Park Service's stated policy is to treat all form letters as a single response.
South Florida Wildlands is asking our supporters to say NO to this extremely risky adventure in the heart of one of the most biodiverse pieces of public land in our nation. Although the enabling legislation for the preserve does allow for oil drilling and related operations, it is certainly not an "anything goes" policy. And nothing of this type or scale has ever been carried out in the preserve before. As one colleague put it - Burnett and the National Park Service will be partnering on a "70,000 acre experiment."
Here's the story in the nutshell. If their project is approved, Burnett plans to lay a grid of source and receiver lines across the center of the preserve. Massive "vibroseis" trucks weighing tens of thousands of pounds each will drive along the source lines, stopping frequently to drop a heavy plate onto the ground to send seismic waves deep into the earth. These "thumper trucks" will be preceded by crews driving lighter off-road vehicles to clear vegetation and check for obstacles (or the presence of endangered and threatened wildlife). Low flying helicopters will be dropping off and picking up "geophones" throughout the survey area along the receiver lines. When the survey is completed, the thumper trucks will have produced approximately 33,000 energy source points that will have been picked up by over 37,000 receiver points in an attempt to obtain a detailed three-dimensional picture of the deep geology of the preserve.
But this is NOT academic research. Burnett is an oil company - and should oil be located in what the company believes to be commercially viable quantities, it will bring in new roads, oil pads, drill rigs, pipes, water wells, diesel generators, drilling chemicals (possibly including fracking fluids) to conduct exploratory oil drilling and and/or production. And all of this in the middle of the most important habitat in Florida for the endangered Florida panther and the hundreds (likely thousands) of native Florida plants and animals which share its extremely fragile habitat.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's a video of a vibroseis truck in action. Watch this machine operating in a desert and try to imagine it driving through the dense vegetation and wetland soils of the Big Cypress National Preserve.
Burnett's entire Plan of Operations can be found here.
Here are just some of the negative impacts we anticipate from Burnett's operation that you can add to your comment (you don't even have to include your name):
