Comment EI-30985
Received or sent (printed as 1/27/2021)
I urge you to choose the no-action alternative for the proposed Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed railway would do serious harm to our region's air, water, land and wildlife and should not be built. It will encourage a destructive water wasting, climate damaging industry that should be shut down, not encouraged! The draft EIS totally fails at what it's supposed to do: assess the harm this oil railway could have on the environment, wildlife and nearby communities. Instead it describes the damage and then encourages more!! We need to sharply reduce fossil fuel use instead of expanding it. Isn't the air quality in the Basin (and along the Wasatch Front) bad enough now? Ruining roadless areas, damaging steep canyons and degrading streams, the railway will wreck more than 10,000 acres of habitat for migratory wildlife and will harm important habitat needed by the rare greater sage grouse and the endangered Barnaby ridge-cress. In Colorado, the project could mean reopening a rail line through scenic Tennessee Pass, and wrecking Browns Canyon, a 22,000-acre national monument designated in 2015 to protect one of the wildest stretches of the Arkansas River. Finally the Uinta Basin Railway would make life difficult for those living in Utah's Argyle Canyon and nearby off-grid canyon communities due to the disruptive noise, traffic delays, and clouds of diesel smoke oil trains will bring along the proposed routes - not to mention the significant potential for accidents, derailments, spills and even sparks that could ignite disastrous wildfires. This project is a mess!!!. Please choose the no-action alternative.
Submitted by: Bruce Plenk · Tucson, AZ
The Board publishes this comment in its environmental-comment table for this proceeding. It is quoted here as printed; nothing is inferred from it, and it states the commenter's own position in their own words, not this record's.
Permanent address docketyard.org/d/FD-36284/comment/EI-30985 · back to the docket sheet