ROY CREEL, ADVISOR, BONNEVILLE NATIONALS INC.:
I regret to announce that SpeedWeek 2015 is cancelled. The most we could find was two and a quarter miles of salt that was suitable for a safe race course.
If the wet salt gets dry,
future events could be possible.
BILL LATTIN, PRESIDENT, SCTA:
Fast cars need minimum three miles, but most need five miles of timing. If they’re going five miles, two to three miles shut down and that’s
just to stop.
BRENDA BOWEN, GEOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH:
Salt Flats by their very nature are ephemeral
environments. They can change just in response
to natural conditions very rapidly.
You add in the impact of land use: mining, racing,
freeway expansion, things like that and all of these things are going to play a role
in impacting the environment.
BILL LATTIN, PRESIDENT, SCTA:
This is
the best salt. The problem with this course is it’s only two miles. But look how the salt is starting to perk up through that mud. it’s turning into white. This could heal in a year. Am I optimistic?
BRENDA BOWEN:
You know, we got this … little … crust of soggy salt on the surface, but then what it’s exposing
is this underlying layer that’s this gympum sand with some clays and muds in there so that’s what does not make a
good racing surface.
MAYOR MIKE CRAWFORD, WENDOVER, UTAH:
I’ve been made aware, the salt flats have been depleting and that the race surface isn’t as good as it was in the past, so the dialogue
has all the sudden opened up, where’d
it go, what happened, will we
ever race again?
ROY CREEL:
We’re the racers, we’re caught in the middle.
we wanna run our race cars and we don’t want the race track to go away. We don’t think it’s right in the name of Potash chemical
sales to deplete
it. The BLM is charged
with protecting this resource. There’s
a strong feeling that they’re not doing a very
good job of it.
KEVIN OLIVER, MANAGER, WEST DESERT DISTRICT BLM:
The Bureau of Land Management has
designated it as an area of critical environmental concern. We take very seriously
the responsibility to manage those salt flats. In 2012,
when we approved the mining to continue, it was with the requirement that
they replenish the salt. We’re confident, the science shows, that the mining companies
are not taking out any more salt than they’re putting back. We believe they are putting
back more salt than they take out.
BRENDA BOWEN:
The mining operation, they are extracting potassium to make fertilizers for agriculture. And that has been going on for over 100 years. They might argue, on the grand scheme
of things, do we need to be feeding our global population or racing cars? The balancea
of sustainability and land use, it’s never black and white. There’s always going to be trade offs.
That area is being used for so many different things.
For recreation, for the racing, for mining,
which is totally in line with what the BLM is mandated
to do with their land, right, multiple
uses—but some of these uses are maybe juxtaposed
and sort of counteracting each other.
It can be very, very difficult to say changes in the
salt flats are due to this one thing, right. They’re all going to be due to all of these different factors
coming in together
but there are some key features that we can look at to try to say what has the impact of mining been, what has the impact of racing been. And that’s part of what my group is trying to really work out, to understand how the environment changed, but also what are the
drivers of that change?
