By Carl-John X Veraja of the Nightly Citizen
In the interest of protecting the public good…
Breitburn Florida LLC is maintaining a Lehigh Park Tank Battery. Pipes carrying crude oil or natural gas through canals and resident’s property without permits or without the DEP bothering to inform the public about the permits.
A natural gas flare is often heard there and it is reported in documents.
Furthermore, old pipes were being removed at the drilling site.
Here is a Google Earth image of the area. Houses are across the street.
This Lehigh Park Tank Battery is very close to homes and is at the corner of Sunset and Curry Avenue.
Since there is a lack of responsiveness from the parties involved, I will present what I can determine with some analysis.
What is starting to take the definite outlines of a DEP-ordered media blackout appears to be underway in Lehigh Acres.
Herschel Vinyard, DEP Secretary, has been pursuing a lawsuit against Dan A. Hughes and the media has been reporting this as if the DEP is somehow a responsible steward of the public good, often leaving out the ugly backstory.
Anyone who has been carefully following the story of Herschel Vinyard knows this beggars credulity.
Vinyard had a conflict of interest coming into his role at DEP, has overseen the dropping of 411 rules from DEP regulations, and had his henchmen, Jeff Littlejohn and Danielle Irwin, try to sabotage efforts to show Rick Scott’s complicity with Big Oil and the fracking of the Everglades–for election time.
That’s what the facts indicate. That’s where the evidence points. That’s where you follow the money to–if you bother. Which the local media clearly doesn’t.
And, hey, foll0w the money with the media–Big Oil advertising.
The DEP was presented with a clear, reasonable, and obvious set of questions and considerations in response to the setup of what looks exactly like a directional drilling acid rig in the place of the old well you see above. And the DEP responded by sending outdated information and ignoring the rest of the questions.
Similarly, the larger newspapers and TV stations have, as part of a continuing trend, been rewriting the story seemingly to meet the political aims of their oil advertisers.
We are supposed to think that the misplaced, corrupt, and complicit Secretary of the DEP, Herschel Vinyard, is doing right by the people of Florida because he is suing Dan A. Hughes?
This seems a ploy. Rick Scott, who invested in pipelines and fracking companies before setting off on this misadventure to exterminate the Everglades, placed and defended Herschel Vinyard. The EPA similarly allowed the case against Herschel Vinyard to be dropped on a statute of limitations.
The News-Press did report a lack of regulation at the Sunshine Elementary school previously, to their credit. But the story has mushroomed since then and they’ve made excuses not to likewise expand the story for their readership.
It would seem that the DEP, if they’re actually concerned about Florida citizens, could at least respond to my inquiries in a serious manner.
I will be sending a new inquiry post haste.
More shall be revealed…