Interior Dept report slams BLm for poor monitoring, lack of accountability at wind & wolar projects

June 24, 2012 (Washington D.C.) – A scathing new report by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Inspector General highlights “significant failures” by the federal Bureau of Land Management in its stewardship over more than 30,000 wind energy right-of-way (ROW) acres and another 31,000 acres of solar energy ROW sites on public lands. View the complete report at http://www.doioig.gov/images/stories/reports/pdf/CR-EV-BLM-0004-2010Public.pdf.

In addition, the report exposed “weakness in financial accountability and resource protection including obligations to protect the Government’s financial interest by collecting rental revenues, managing the bond process, and by appropriate monitoring and enforcing ROW requirements.”

The BLM is poised to add another 21 million acres identified with wind energy development potential and over 20 million acres for potential solar energy facilities, raising serious concerns over enforcement of mitigation requirements for impacts on public lands.

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The report is damning when it comes to BLM enforcement of mitigation requirements. “Our review of wind project files revealed very little inspection documentation for wind projects and no monitoring plans,” the report found. “One BLM field manager told us that wind projects `run themselves’ and do not have many issues requiring monitoring.

Read more: http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/node/10145


I have observed firsthand the total lack of monitoring in Ocotillo during construction of a wind energy project on 12,500 acres of public lands. Two photographers have become the de facto monitors, members of the public who have documented dozens of serious violations of health and safety regulations and even such severe things as radically changing drainage patterns without bothering to pull permits, using water from unauthorized sources (brackish and contaminated with invasive vegetation), bulldozing over animal burrows and burrowing owls' dens, bulldozing far more of the desert than was authorized, and failing to have water onsite at all for many days to keep down dust that is known to be contaminated with deadly Valley Fever spores.

It is outrageous that developers are being allowed to do their own "monitoring" which is anything but. If the BLM can't afford to send monitors out to watch what is going on, then we shouldn't be alllowing these projects to be built.

I'm watching an entire town suffer and children be exposed to a deadly disease here, Indian graves being desecrated and the BLM won't stop the project. It is absolutely heartbreaking. The BLM needs to top to bottom cleaning out; thanks to the Inspector General in the Dept of Interior for exposing this travesty.

They even found a multi-ton turbine that had fallen over at one site due to a hydraulic leak, and was never reported.