The March 7 article, “Drilling mud spills go unreported, draining into gulch near Rifle,” is another example of oil and gas drilling’s inherent danger to our water and wildlife. Even pits that “were lined and considered to be well-built” leaked and sent tens of thousands — perhaps over 100,000 — barrels of dirty water, mud and chemicals in a nearby stream.

This incident should provide pause as we think about the impacts of drilling on the Roan Plateau’s undeveloped, public lands. We should consider that allowing even “limited” or “restrictive” drilling on the Roan is no assurance that these all-to-common accidents won’t occur.

The stakes of such a spill are high on the Roan Plateau. After all, it only takes one spill to permanently kill off one of the few remaining genetically pure cutthroat troat populations or introduce serious contaimenents into Parachute’s watershed. Certain areas have natural values that are simply too unique and important to put at risk.

Drilling is already occuring at an unprecendented rate on the Western Slope and huge swaths of our public lands already leased for drilling. In this context, there’s no good reason to open the Roan’s undeveloped, public lands — what amounts to about 1 percent of all the public land in one of North America’s most active gas fields — to natural gas drilling. Especially considering that the BLM’s own figures indicate that 86 percent of the natural gas underneath the plateau can be extracted from existing drilling sites and adjacent private lands, protecting the Roan’s other natural resources should be a priority.

LIBBY KENNARD
Grand Junction

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 9:18 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.