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Company owners defend project at site carved from wilderness area
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The area in Utah’s Emery County where Colorado-based Twin Bridges wants to site a well pad to pursue directional drilling for exploration for helium. The project has come under fire by environmental critics who filed a lawsuit to prevent it from going forward because they say the drilling would have visual impacts to a wilderness area. Company officials say the drilling operation would be based on a 5.4-acre well site on federal land, but was legally carved out from the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness designation in 2019.
Rayzel: By day, visitors to Hovenweep National National Monument can marvel at structures still standing hundreds of years after Ancestral Pueblo people built them. But by night.
Pollard: (:13) It can be mind-blowing. Just the first time you see that Milky Way, shooting star. Just how incredibly dark those skies are.”
Erika Pollard is the associate director for the southwest region of the National Parks Conservation Association. She doesn’t just love dark skies, she wants to see them protected. Dark skies have many benefits, like for migrating wildlife, and their impairment also means a cultural loss for many people, including Native American tribes who continue to fight for dark sky preservation.
Groups Look to Biden Administration to Save Utah Wildlands publicnewsservice.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from publicnewsservice.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For Immediate Release, December 22, 2020
Contact:
Steve Bloch, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, (801) 859-1552, steve@suwa.org
Anne Hawke, Natural Resources Defense Council, (646) 823-4518, ahawke@nrdc.org
Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity, (801) 300-2424, tmckinnon@biologicaldiversity.org
John Weisheit, Living Rivers, (435) 260-2590, john@livingrivers.org
Court Blocks Drilling Set to Begin in Newly Designated Utah Wilderness
WASHINGTON A federal judge today enjoined the Trump administration’s approval of a plan to punch a helium well into the heart of the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness in Utah just two days before Christmas. Road construction was set to begin Wednesday.
“Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness is too special to drill,” said Landon Newell, staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “We’re grateful the court enjoined this ill-conceived project and gave this incomparable landscape a brief reprieve. We’ll
Judge taps brakes on drilling in Utah wilderness on eve of federal OK
Construction crews are poised to start work in the newly designated wilderness preserve but a judge will decide whether they can fire up their engines.
(Courtesy photo by Ray Bloxham, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance) An energy company hoped to begin drilling for helium starting Wednesday on this site in the newly designated Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness. Environmentalists have gone to court to prevent the Bureau of Land Management from approving the Bowknot helium project, proposed by Twin Bridges Resources. | Updated: 12:17 a.m.
Labyrinth Canyon is among Utah’s most quiet and remote red rock locales, where the Green River has incised deep into the San Rafael Desert, leaving a broad loop in the river channel called Bowknot Bend.