With the Construction of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve storage facilities at the Richton Salt domes, The Federal Government is planning to pull 52 Million Gallons of fresh water from the Pascagoula River at Merril EVERY DAY FOR FIVE YEARS. Then it will only be about a million a day from then on.

Also important, the returning water after use to remove the salt will run in a pipeline (along with Crude oil separate pipeline and power supply), all the way down to Bayou Casotte in Pascagoula and be dumped into the Gulf.  This brine has about 10 times the salt concentration of the Gulf of Mexico and is expected to only raise the salinity by about 4 Parts Per Thousand (not million). This will effect the fish, shrimp and oyster populations within the effected areas, which are multiple and are measured in miles.

The environmental impact statement says that salt water and crude oil leakage into the Pascagoula will be minimal and should, along with construction sediment, be dissipated rather quickly.

The Studies have been done and the impact statement on the water resources can be read at:

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/spr/publications/2006_SPR_EIS/C_3_06.pdf.

The contact in Washington for this project is listed as:

David Johnson

Office of Fossil Energy

(FE-40)

U. S. Department of Energy

Washington, DC 20585

202-586-4410

 

A company called ICF International is doing the environmental impact statement

Of course this leaves out the new site at Merril and only talks about the original site on the Leaf River.  Apparently the Leaf did not have enough flow and they have decided to use the Pascagoula at Merril Bridge as the site.

The river information was left out of all the news releases and no one, even the local county officials, were aware of this.