Johnny French Interview, Part 1 of 2

DT: My name is David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It's February 24th, 2006. And we're in Zapata, Texas, and have the good fortune to be visiting with Johnny French, who is a-a biologist who's worked both for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and its predecessor, the Federal Power Commission, and for many subsequent years, for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service out of Corpus Christi. And in the course of doing that, got to issue a number of, write on, and-and draft a number of environmental impact statements, and biological opinions about projects and species here in Texas. And I've heard-visiting with us, I wanted to thank you.

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JF: You're always welcome.

DT: I thought we might start by asking about your childhood, and if there might have been early experiences that suggested you might go into the wildlife field or conservation field like you have.

00:02:18 - 2371 JF: I always knew that I would do something with fishing. If I could managed to-to combine my-my favorite recreation with my avocation, vocation, whatever you want to call it, I was absolutely going to do that. But it was-it was quite some time before I-I got it narrowed down that much. I could have gone into a number of biological fields and just loved it. And I got into my first professional application of biology with the Navy, of all things. Because I'd already had a couple of years of-of junior college, that made it

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easy for me to apply and become a-a-a naval Corps man. One of my early heroes going through Navy Corps School was Bill Cosby, because of all things, he happened to have written and performed his first LP about the time I was in Corps School, because he had been a Corps man in Korea. Works for him. But years later, I had a little flashback. I-we-it was in a-in a situation similar to the one that he describes about running up on the beach and, you know, safe, you know. He was in a foxhole, watching the war. Oh,

00:03:33 - 2371 look, there's a ship in the air. And somebody calls out, "Medic." Well, of course he was a little embarrassed to-to note that, you know, he was very happy where he was, and he didn't want to be involved, you know. "What's the problem?" "My leg. My leg." "Take two aspirin and mail in the five dollars." Same thing happened to me in Vietnam. On the last day there, as we were waiting to leave, our flight got delayed, of course. And in the middle of standing to attention early in the morning, because we'd had to spend the night at the USO sleeping on the floor and the stage, and anywhere we could find, the

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middle of-of roll call-gosh knows why anybody needed to have their roll call the day they were to leave Vietnam, but they were doing it-we got rocketed. This was in Danang Airport, and we didn't know anything about it. Finally somebody calls out and says, "Hey, here's the air raid shelter." So people go piling in to this long bunker. You know, it's got an opening at both ends, and, you know, about four million GI's packed in between them. I hear this voice. "Medic." "What's the problem?" And then I realized

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that my equipment was outside in the little parade ground. Run out there, grab it, run it back in, the far end. "Okay, what's the problem? What's the problem?" One of the Zoomies, a-a-a-a-a youngster really, a young guy that must have weighed three hundred pounds, had been shaving and stepped on his razor when the alarm went off. I'm sure he got a Purple Heart for it.

DT: If-if you don't mind, I'd-I'd like to back up just a little bit. Before Vietnam, before the Navy Corps, and-and talk about some of the-the early experiences. The first rock, the first flounder...

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JF: Well, sure. DT: ...the first velvet ant. I think some of these first experiences.

00:05:43 - 2371 JF: First rock I ever-ever put in my rock collection was picked up on my grandmother's farm in Northern Missouri. It-it was many years before I learned what it really was, but you know, it got me started on-on earth science that I haven't put down since.

DT: What-what appealed to you about this rock, this particular rock?

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JF: Well, I was fascinated with its form, its color, and how it came to be. And to tell you the truth, there's a lot of scientists that are still trying to figure them out. Agates are neat. It's like that-that kind of thing. So we could have spent four hours today picking up more agates right down the-the shoreline here on-on Falcon Lake. It's a wonderful place to go. The first fish, I can't remember the first fish, but I know I was fishing by the

00:06:28 - 2371 time I was six years old. I remember the first fishing pole I broke-on a great huge flounder. I remember, as you say, the first velvet ant I ever found, and the first big green caterpillar with long black spines, larva of the Io Moth, because both stung the fool out of me when I was trying to take it to my parents to get the I.D. Those sort of things, you know, any kid'll do. But I never grew up. I'm still doing that.

DT: Was-was your dad or you mother, or some other kinds of family members knowledgeable about the flounder, or about the Io Moth, or...

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JF: Oh, oh, certainly. My-my father and...

DT: ...tell you about what these things were?

00:07:18 - 2371 JF: My father certainly wouldn't have tried to tell me what most of the things were, except for the fish. Okay. Because he fished his whole life, and took me fishing when I was barely, you know, big enough to hold a pole. We spent forever, you know, fishing constantly. And if we weren't fishing, the whole family would go on a-on a vacation

00:07:38 - 2371 trip to Garner Park, which is still my favorite park in Texas to this day. Part of that's association with childhood, I'm sure. But it still a beautiful place, and I'd love to see a lot more kids grow up and-and visit it.

DT: Did you camp there at the park?

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JF: Sure we did.

DT: Did-tell about some of your early camping (?)?

00:07:56 - 2371 JF: Oh, heck. CH is among the persons that has been experiencing this kind of stuff with me all these years. I wish I could get out and camp more, but I can't any longer. I can't camp more than six-six feet from a-a-an electrical outlet, because I can't sleep without a-a piece of equipment. But at-at any rate, yeah, I remember one year we visited Garner Park, the weekend before, I think it was Labor Day. And there was

00:08:28 - 2371 nobody there. Everybody was waiting for Labor Day. So we woke up the next morning in the best part of the park, and it was totally deserted, there was nobody there. For two days the park ranger didn't even come around to collect their money. The only drawback to having that whole place to our self, as far as people was concerned, is that we didn't

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have it all to ourselves as far as nature was concerned. CH woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me don't move because there were three skunk tails going by my cot. But it's still a great place to visit.

DT: I think it's interesting that you had this instinct from early on to-to go out and collect bits and pieces, and artifacts, and bring them home and try to describe them, keep them. What do you think that-that instinct is?

00:09:21 - 2371 JF: I don't know that it's an instinct. I think it's taught. My-my father, as I said, kept introducing me to things. I became a pebble pup when I was still, you know, sub teen. Pebble pup, of course, is a young rock hound. But I-I use the-use the term advisedly because I believe it was the Chicago Museum of Natural History organized this thing you could send off and you would get a little kit of different minerals. And that

00:09:50 - 2371 was the beginning of, you know, whatever it is you wanted to do. Well, Dad couldn't be stopped with that. Having begun with that, he said, well, just, you know, down the road a few miles is a place we can pull off and step out and collect our own rocks. And we started picking up pieces of petrified wood, and other things that we-we didn't even know about. Dad was as eager to learn as I was. I was just, you know, following in his footsteps. And I think also because he grew up on a-on a farm, he was that much more

00:10:24 - 2371 in to nature. But here he was in the Navy. We used to say the two of us, you know, put in thirty years together, but he put in twenty-seven and a half. The thing was, he-he was constantly trying to get back to his youth. He did like to get out in the country, he did like to go fishing, and he always took me along.

DT: Can you tell about some of your early fishing trips?

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JF: Oh, good grief. Garner Park, for example, was a terrific place to go fishing. And even if you forgot some of the gear, it was still a whole lot of fun. All you really needed was, you know, a hook and a line, and whatever you could find. We spent hours chasing grasshoppers. But we discovered that, you know, Texas is kind of neat this way. The bottoms of the streams belong to the public. The only problem is getting access to the

00:11:18 - 2371 bottoms of the streams, and Garner was one of those places. But if you want to take the time, you can step into the water and not get out for miles down stream. Just keep walking. Stay in the water. Most beautiful scenery in the world. You've got, you know, springs dripping into it, moss, and-and wild stuff growing everywhere. Of course, fish in every little hole. We made one of our treks one morning, and-and we're, you know, a mile or more from a-from the camp before we realized that nobody had a stringer. So

00:11:51 - 2371 we-we unbuttoned our pockets and stuffed the fish in there. And we came back to camp and had lunch with-with Blue Gill ala-ala T-shirt. Hey. It's-it's one of those things that you just have to experience without planning. Planning kind of takes the fun away from it. It's extemporaneous things are-are-are what become memorable. And that's what I remember. Not having a-a stringer, but having lots of places to tuck our fish.

DT: Well, speaking of fishing, I-I think that's been a lifelong interest of yours.

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JF: Always. DT: And-and when you fish, you do both fe-fresh and salt water?

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JF: Yes. It's all a matter of-of what Mother Nature will allow. On a good windy day you can't fish in the surf. On a windy day you can go to a lake, however, and fish for catfish or whatever happens to be around. It's a matter of taste, though, that I prefer to go surf fishing because I love a fish called the Pompano. I have a rod rack out there in the

00:12:51 - 2371 parking lot right now on the front of my little Blazer. It's a four-wheel drive. I had a-a-an interview one time with a reporter from the-the New York Times. He came down and went back, and he wrote about our discussions of drilling for oil and gas in the National Seashore. And he wrote about how ironic it was that someone of-of my background, a-an environmentalist he called me, would drive a four-by-four. And what he neglected to notice was that he couldn't have been where we went without one. So it's-needs/must. It's not the Devil driving me, I guarantee you. You can be an environmentalist, and you can drive an SUV. It's possible to do both. And sometimes

00:13:38 - 2371 you have to do both. Now, the National Seashore is a place that I revere. In little over a week, a lot of us will be down in the middle of the four-wheel drive area picking up trash, because a fisherman organized this thing. And last year, I think we had three hundred and fifty people show up. A lot of them never fished, or haven't fished in years. But they couldn't stand to see the trash on the beach. Take that a step further, I couldn't stand to

00:14:09 - 2371 see people driving eighteen wheelers down the beach. And not just because I wanted to go fishing, but because there were children on that beach, there were threatened species on that beach, there were reasons not to have them there. So we had a big disagreement. The Sierra Club supported my side of it to a certain extent. The National Park Service did not.

DT: Was this about oil and gas...

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JF: This is about oil and gas development, yes. The National Seashore does not own the subsurface rights. They don't own the oil and gas underneath it. And the state of Texas owns a great deal of it right up to it. So if you want to-to drill at the National Seashore, all you have to do is ask. Eh, it's not really that easy. As a result, then the National Park Service has to do an environmental review of the process. And that's where people like me could step in and say, well, wait a minute, you haven't looked at

00:15:07 - 2371 these alternative, you should try this, you might try that. The National Environmental Policy Act doesn't require that you use the advice, only that you solicit it. And the Park Service has done that-that minimal amount. But to this day, it's-it's kind of-I look like-like a-a fool saying this, but-but they probably should have allowed more environmental impact on that island than the Park Service was willing to. The reason for letting people drive on the beach to get to their-their well sites was that it's cheap. And

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it does not require that they build more roadway than they just absolutely have to. The problem though is that they're making the oil companies, the drilling companies themselves, drive right across an area where the Ridley Sea Turtle nests. Now even if they don't do this during the nesting season, they're still doing a lot of impact. And my-my solution to this was to have them connect a bunch of old oil roads back behind the dunes so they never have to drive on the beach again. That causes an

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environmental impact because there are resources of other kinds back there. But none of them are in danger. So it's a trade-off, and as I say, Park Service didn't agree with me. But that's life. They did have to respect my right to speak about it.

DT: Well, this-I think you've been dealing with these impacts and trade-offs from projects for-for years. And it probably goes back all the way to your days in graduate school at Texas A&M, where I understand for your Masters thesis you looked at the impacts and alternatives for once-through cooling systems for power plants.

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JF: Yeah. DT: You-can you talk about that whole issue, and-and the alternatives you considered?

00:17:10 - 2371 JF: Well, the-there-there-there have been a number of times when the Masters research that did, and actually it was only part of a little summer program. The thing I was really working on fell through because, although we were working at a power plant, the-the electricity that was required to-to keep a bunch of tanks full of-of crabs and shrimp and so forth, kept going off, and everything kept going belly up. So we wound up

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pretty much using something that I had done as-as an undergraduate and turning it into a-a Masters thesis. It worked out fairly effectively. What we were dealing with was pretty much an industry standard. And this is-this is back in-in the early 1970's. Most power plants require some kind of a cooling system. The very cheapest of them is to take water from, you know, a body of water like a-a lake or-or in this case, a-a bay, and pump it through their-their-their systems.

DT: What-what (inaudible)?

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JF: Well, this was the P. H. Robinson Generating Station near-near Texas City, just a little ways off of that. It would take water out of Dickinson Bayou and-and run it through their cooling coils, pump it into a discharge canal, and discharge it into Galveston Bay. And the problem there was that virtually everything within the discharge canal, and a pretty good radius within the discharge point into the Galveston Bay area,

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was devoid of fish during most of the summer. A great deal of our fisheries here in-in the Texas coast involve organisms that have upper limits of tolerance very close to as warm as it ever gets here in-on the Texas coast as far as water's concerned, somewhere around ninety degrees Fahrenheit. And this plant was at least ten to fifteen degrees above ambient most of the time. So it was determined that they would try to take some water and bypass the plant. Instead of pumping all the water through the plant, they would take

00:19:20 - 2371 a little out, run it around the plant, and dump it into the discharge canal. The bypass system was what I studied, before and after, to see if improved the conditions of the fish. And what it did, as a matter fact, did reduce, you know, the temperatures within the discharge canal, but everything that it pumped through the bypass system got killed anyway. So at-the-the trade-off didn't work. And my understanding is, some years afterwards, P. H. Robinson went to what many of the-of the generating stations in the

00:19:55 - 2371 industry have gone to, and that's a-a cooling tower. They use a combination of evaporative cooling and-and sometimes other water sources. But they keep the water down without running it straight through the plant, which is, you know, a great plus. Learned quite a bit from this process because later on it was easy to kind of use the-the same terminology, the same equipment almost was a-involved-in what I did for the-the Federal Energy and Regulatory Commission.

DT: I think this was your first job coming out of graduate school.

00:20:30 - 2371 JF: This was really-really my first good job. I had-I had a-a job that was-absolutely the very first one. After I got my Masters Degree it was at a funeral home. I lasted exactly two weeks at that job. We thought it would fit in real well because I had been a Corps man, I had driven an ambulance, and, you know, once you've driven one body, life or dead, it, you know, it shouldn't make much difference. But after spending

00:20:53 - 2371 Halloween night in the funeral home, I decided that was the end of that-that-that particular thing.

So I-I-I took my next job with Baroid Corporation, became a mud logger. The first as far as-as the-the teachers could tell me, Master's Degree in fisheries that had ever become a mud logger. And I was kind of over-qualified for that, and I lasted at that for six months drilling wells all over south Texas, some of them not far from where we're sitting now. But it didn't pay well, and it was, you know, a twelve

00:21:29 - 2371 hour a day project, and-even a-even a grad student can't really appreciate working that much that long.

So I got out of that because April 1st is-1975, I got an opportunity to go to work in Washington D.C. with what was then called the Federal Power Commission. The Federal Power Commission changed its name not long thereafter. It wasn't anything to do with me, but it became the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And I-I

00:21:58 - 2371 remember the-the people in charge held a-a full staff meeting the morning that the name change occurred. And the-the man very clearly in charge said very clearly to all of us, you shall not pronounce the acronym. Of course everybody did immediately thereafter. That's one of those Dilbert things.

But with the Federal Power Commission, among the things that I started doing almost immediately was working with another once-through system for LNG, Liquefied Natural Gas. But with Liquefied Natural Gas, what

00:22:39 - 2371 we were dealing with was the opposite of the heat exchange that I saw with at the power plant. Because the water that went through was used to warm a very cold liquid, liquefied natural gas, the water that was released from the plant after this once-through had occurred was many degrees colder than ambient rather than-than being many degrees hot. And other than that, the process was very similar. You have the same kind of-of impacts to fauna, but in in-you know, different degrees. If you're trying to keep one of these systems operative, you have to clean it from time to time because fouling

00:23:15 - 2371 occurs. All the little pipes and channels that the water runs through, if they're exposed to-to water for very long, thing grow in there. Could be barnacles, it could be, you know, some-some types of bryozoans, but things that you have to get out of there, and you use a-a chemical and a mechanical methodology to get rid of it. And these things tend to be toxic, so they wind up in the environment. So whether you're heating the water or cooling the water, you have similar impacts. And you worry about what's got to occur,

00:23:47 - 2371 not just in the plant, but down stream of it. So for quite some time I played with those.

I also got involved in writing my-my first impact statements. These are-are not a project that an individual would handle. It took teams to do these. Because some of the projects were very big. Many of them had to do with LNG. But absolutely the biggest project ever seen at that time, as you're probably aware, was the-the Alaskan Oil Pipeline from Prudhoe Bay. What many people didn't realize was that they weren't just

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producing oil up there in Prudhoe Bay, but producing natural gas. In those days natural gas didn't amount to anything as far as our economy was concerned. We were burning lots of gas, of course, in-in-in cars, and making diesel and making fuel oils and so forth, but the natural gas itself was so ubiquitous that it was actually a liability to the people drilling the wells, so they would tend to flare it. Now picture all these flares going on up there on the North Slope, and picture the headaches we have today with-with global warming and you-you-you begin to see that we probably did the right thing,

00:25:07 - 2371 maybe for the wrong reasons. But eventually the FERC prevailed and they were told don't flare it, don't waste it, pump it back in the ground. And because of that policy, to this day we are still getting oil out of those fields that could have been depleted because there wasn't enough pressure there to get it out of the ground any longer. Now we could have gone to injection of-of CO2 or-or pumping steam or done-you know, there was a lot of things we could have done, but the smartest thing was to put the gas back in the

00:25:38 - 2371 well. Well, it's still there. It has to come home, to Chicago and-and to San Francisco, and places in between. And that means that there is an alternative very similar to the oil pipeline that's been under consideration for close on forty years and hasn't been built. This was just in the paper yesterday that Alaska has approved essentially what I was working on thirty years ago, and that was called the Alaska Natural Gas Transportation System, which has a excellent, excellent acronym-ANGTS.

DT: Did you-do you have angst about that kind of project?

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JF: We have-we-well, I haven't worried about it, but the FERC worried about it. In those days they had a like a-a regular session almost continuously of administrative law judges overhearing the hearings, because there competing companies that wanted to build a thing or alternatives to it. And as I well recall, it took, for the transcripts, a very large book case, the whole-all of three hundred days of testimony in that thing. A little tiny piece of it involved some of my early testimony. Now mind you this. This is the-the first job I've had right out of college that really amounts to anything compared to

00:27:07 - 2371 what I had done in college. And I wound up testifying to a judge on things like what would happen if you dug gravel out of a-a-of a river, which I've never seen or got within a thousand miles of on the North Slope of Alaska, how it would affect the ecology of the North Slope and-of the river in particular if you did that. All of this was instant expertship. Just like, you know, becoming a Corps man, you're an instant doctor. Well, it takes a little more than that. But, you know, as a young kid coming out of college, it

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was-it was amazing that anybody would listen to me, much less believe it. And yet I managed to convince, you know, a lot of people, even myself, that I knew something about a place I'd never been, and an ecology I'd never seen. I bring that up because I know there's-there's people out there who probably suspected this of experts for a very long time. And I-and I-I need to tell you this, that it can happen. But everything that I testified to was under oath, and I believe it was true at the time. So I wasn't trying to pull anybody's leg. I even wound up quoting from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi about

00:28:28 - 2371 what would happen if you snuck out in the-the dark of night and-and cut a little, you know, channel along the edge of the Mississippi, the course of that mighty river would change, and that's what I told the judge. If you did the same thing here with the gravel mining operation, you could cause a whole fishery to go away overnight because all the water would disappear. He believed it, and I still do believe it. But that's the sort of

00:28:54 - 2371 thing that an early interest in fishing will get you into. You will study things that have nothing to do with how to bait a hook just because it's interesting to know something about the fish. You know, why a fish does what it does, and why people do things to fish that they shouldn't. You learn the hard way, but you learn. And sometimes learning is an end in itself, and sometimes it's useful. Even reading The Life on the Mississippi.

DT: Well, did you work on any other energy related projects for you were at FERC that might have related your fishery background and wildlife background, and...

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JF: Well, just-just a little bit. But I-one of the oddest things that came out of it was we were looking at a distribution pipeline for some of the gas that would have been brought down from the North Slope of Alaska. There were several alternatives in the area of, oh, from, let's say, Santa Barbara down to-to Los Angeles, to bring this stuff in, re-gasify it and put it in the pipeline. One of these pipelines would have had to go a pretty good distance in order to get to a major transmission line from the coast, the Santa

00:30:14 - 2371 Barbara one in particular. That one eventually went away because the original location turned out to be on top an earthquake fault, which was more amazing than anything because right up the road was a nuclear plant also built right on that fault. Live and learn. But the-the interesting thing was about this pipeline, it-it went through an area of Southern California know as the San Joaquin Valley. And because of my background in the Navy and the medical information that I'd gotten into, I wound up writing in an

00:30:54 - 2371 impact statement that there had better be regular health checkups for the people who constructed the pipeline, particularly those who were Black, because Negroes in particular, it turned out were very susceptible to a fungal disease called San Joaquin Valley Fever. And that if they did not regularly have skin tests, which I had administered, they could very well come up with this disease. What's the connection to fisheries? Nothing. But it's kind of-of-it-it's one of those little-little anecdotal things that pops into your head, and it wounds up-winds up being used. I will give you an example of a source of

00:31:43 - 2371 information that just happened. But it-it got used at some ig-some length in that ANGTS pipeline project, and also in another one involving LNG, and in-in Southern Alaska. Back in those days, this was the-the-the mid 1970's, the Alaska Airlines had just been formed. Actually, they'd been around a while, but the name was new. And it hadn't been in business so long that it yet had a back of a seat brochure or a magazine. So for lack of that, it just happened that there's an Alaska Magazine, so that's what they put back there. And I happen to read one of these things on a-a long flight back and forth

00:32:34 - 2371 from Washington D.C., and-and to Anchorage, and I noticed that there was a section in there that had to do with fish and wildlife. And it was taken from the Alaska Fish and Game's data files. All their nice format. By the time we got done with the ANGTS EIS, there was something seven or eight references to Alaska Magazine with information that was specific to the pipeline route, and how it might be affected. Lots of stuff in there about fish, and lots of it was useful.

DT: So the-the situation with ANGTS, and then the-the later s-San Joaquin Pipeline make me think of two things. One is if you're-you're doing a-a biological review, and you're trying to anticipate things that might happen. You know, the-the gravel dredging case. You know, what if they dredge, and then...

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JF: Yes. It's...

DT: ...and then what if there's a fish population there, and what if it's the only fish population?

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JF: Right.

DT: And what if (?)...

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JF: It's all crystal ball. Yeah. DT: There's that aspect. And the other is what happens if there are-there's information that just doesn't exist? You know, like...

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JF: Sure. The fault. What if-what if...

DT: ...what if the fault didn't appear on a map, and yet, that's a possible issue if you need to consider this is not unthinkable that there be earthquakes and faults in California. But where do you draw the boundary between what is a realistic risk and what is something that's beyond that?

00:34:13 - 2371 JF: Oh, now you get into the-the-the very esoteric science, if that's what you want to call it, of risk assessment, personally I didn't have to deal with that. The FERC had a lot of engineers who were very good at it, and to this day are very good at. And I don't know what language they speak, to tell you the truth. It's very mathematical. And-and perhaps it's true. But the only engineer that I'm aware of that I would trust absolutely,

00:34:50 - 2371 this one called Murphy. Such a-such a man did exist. I saw I think in Science Magazine years ago, the guy is since deceased, but his son had written because someone had referred to Murphy's Law and had quoted it, as generally we understand it, that "If the worst can happen, it will." The son said it isn't exactly what my father said. Murphy's Law is really this. Failure is inevitable. And that is the case with every

00:35:25 - 2371 pipeline, every ship, every tanker spill. It's going to happen. Maybe not today, it may not be in this place, but when it does happen, you know, turn to Murphy, that's the only engineer who warned you about it. If you didn't do anything about it, well, then that's-you know, that's your mistake.

Biologists, like myself, were constantly getting in Dutch, trying to tell engineers how to do their job. We finally learned the hard way to tell them not how to do it, but to give them the end result. If you-if you tell an engineer to build a

00:36:07 - 2371 levee in a particular way, the levee's going to fail. And they will inevitably blame the biologist who designed it. Not a problem. I actually took a course in-in Texas A&M, and I could have built a levee with the engineering skills that I got there. But naturally I'd have got blamed, you know, for all kinds of iniquity if I'd tried because I wasn't, you know, a card carrying engineer. What we had to do was tell the engineer who was responsible for keeping a failure from occurring in a critical habitat of the Whooping Crane, that it better not, or we will have your hides for it. As a biologist, we can talk

00:36:51 - 2371 about hides. Okay? But we can't talk about how to construct levees. It's the end result that counts. If-if you're afraid that you shouldn't have a pipeline in a particular area because there's a-a-an earthquake fault, tell the engineer to fix it so that it can't fail even though the fault is there. It can be done. Just ask them. But by God, don't tell them how.

DT: So the-the distinction between the-what the-the engineer might consider and what a biologist considers is sort of a-a matter of time? That-that if he-given enough time...

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JF: Sure.

DT: ...there will be a failure.

00:37:33 - 2371 JF: This goes back to risk assessment. Yeah. Risk assessment assumes that-that there will be a failure, but it's giving odds as to how soon. And the problem is that the odds do catch up with you. If it's a one in a million happenstance that a tanker will, you know, lose half a million gallons of crude oil, stop and ask yourself how many tankers are there, how many trips they make a year, and how soon that half a million spill will occur, because it will. And then you get to thinking about, well, what could I do to prepare before hand, because it's going to happen. You know, what should we have in place?

00:38:13 - 2371 This consideration was done in the Critical Habitat portion of the Intracoastal Waterway, where it runs through the Whooping Crane habitat. Things that came to mind were what-you know, let's have on station within a matter of a few minutes of deployment, a boom. You know, anywhere along this-if it spills, and it spills here, and the wind's in the wrong direction, how are we going to stop it from getting back into a marsh where your equipment can't go? Well, have your equipment already there between it and the area

00:38:50 - 2371 that you can't go. Have somebody on call twenty-four hours a day. Who's the closest that can deploy, who can get in there first, who can plug the hole before it happens? If there's a-a-an issue at all with a contaminant that can't be cleaned up, think of another way to ship it through that area. Maybe by sea isn't the best idea. Maybe a truck would be better. So, you know, there-there are always alternatives that you can minimize a risk with. The problem is that they always seem to be the expensive ones. So now it

00:39:25 - 2371 becomes an issue of which is more important, the dollar value of the preparation that prevents a clean-up, and the dollar value of having to clean it up and losing an endangered species at the same time? And then finally you get to-to the real issue. So many of these things that-that are-are played off against the environmental organizations of being a matter of-of jobs versus environment, or people versus, you know, the-the endangered cricket, or whatever, these are all misleading. You know,

00:40:07 - 2371 they're-they're-they're-they're-they're going off into left field. The comparison that you're making isn't one of, you know either-or. You can have both. It's a matter of how do you do it so that both sides are-are least offended by the result. So long as you're saying you have to do it the cho-the cheapest way, you're going to wind up losing every time, because you can't avoid the risk. The risk is always there. You can minimize it, you can't avoid it.

DT: Well, maybe we could-we could move to the next major chapter in your life, which was of going to work as the-as a-a-Fish and Wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where you made a career of trying to weigh these different risks. And-can you tell me how was it you came to be hired at the Fish and Wildlife Service?

00:41:01 - 2371

JF: Easiest thing in the world. I mean this came up on a-on a-the announcements-jobs, you know, are-are constantly being blasted around the world, I guess, you know. Here's the opportunity and so forth. When I saw this in my own hometown, it didn't take too long to write up a resume that, you know, put me there. I don't know who I was competing with, but I got on in an instant. All I can say is that-that it was-it was a very happy, you know, coincidence that that job opened up when it

00:41:40 - 2371 did, and I never moved from it. I mean the-the-the office moved once in the twenty-three and a half years I worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service, but I never ever thought about going someplace else. I quit looking at those sheets that say "Here's an opportunity someplace else." I mean I could certainly have gone to a-a good fishing hole-in Alaska, for example. But then probably most of the year would have been too

00:42:07 - 2371 cold to go fishing. I had it perfect. You know, where I was, where I grew up, everything that I-I had studied in school, it all came together, it all clicked. And I wound up kind of defending my fishing holes. A lot of the-the early work I did with the Fishing-Fish and Wildlife Service wasn't with big projects, but a ton of little ones.

DT: Can you give some examples?

00:42:31 - 2371

JF: Sure. Well, the commonest of-of permits that-that the Fish and Wildlife Service branch that I was with, Ecological Services deals with, is the oil and gas exploration permits. Corps of Engineers probably issues, oh, in the neighborhood of one or two hundred a year. General permits and specific permits for drilling a well or drilling a well field, all these things come before the Fish and Wildlife Service for review, and we

00:42:59 - 2371 make recommendations. We don't do it in concert with more than, you know, general guidelines, most of these things have to be done specifically on site. You have to go and look, you know, or you have to have already been there and know pretty much what it-what it's like. You can't make a rule book up and just go by that. Otherwise, the Corps of Engineers would not need to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisher Service, and the Texas Park and Wildlife Department.

DT: And these reviews are very site-based decisions.

00:43:32 - 2371

JF: Yes, they are. And they have to be coordinated as part of the-the Wildlife-you know, Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act requires these agencies to be contacted and they have to respond in-in return to the Corps of Engineers each time one of these permits is even considered. So I did an awful lot of that for years, and...

DT: It sounds like a good, typical concern to be raised in oil and gas...

00:43:56 - 2371

JF: The-the typical-typical who-concern about oil and gas have to do more than anything with access to the site. Coastal Texas is very shallow as-as you're probably aware. All the bays are, on average, less that six feet deep. Some areas, almost all of it's less than four feet deep. Most of the equipment that needs to get in there in order to-to drill a well and to service it afterwards draws six feet. So if you're out in the middle Corpus Christi Bay and it's thirteen feet deep, it's not a big problem. If you happen to be

00:44:28 - 2371

in the middle of the Laguna Madre, and you would have to essentially dredge a channel for four miles across a sea grass bed in order to get to that site, then you start looking at-at little things like directional drilling and other alternatives. But what generally happens is that, you know, there were years of-of-of drilling on the Texas coast before we had the environmental rules that we're applying today. And that means there's a lot of channels out there that were dug with-that wouldn't be dug today. So you would tell the

00:45:02 - 2371 drilling get as close as you can using existing channel. You know, if you maintain it, that's better than cutting a brand new one. But get as close as you can and directional drill. That's-that's-that's worked out pretty well.

The other little headache is one of timing. A lot of-of the Texas coast has resources like migratory birds, or-actually nesting sea birds is the big issue. So if you've got an island near one of these well sites on which they're nesting, you probably want to stay say a thousand feet from it during nesting season. After that, before that, it's no problem, but not during that-that critical

00:45:40 - 2371 month of, say, May through September. It depends on the species. Again, if we're looking at a rookery for something like a-a Blue Heron, Blue Herons might nest as early as December or January. Now if there's nothing else nesting there, maybe you can go ahead and drill a well starting in March. And on the other hand, if you've got a very sensitive species, one that you might have repercussions with even when the drilling isn't going on, like if something gets spilled while they're drilling, you might be real careful,

00:46:17 - 2371 for example, about how you drill anywhere near a critical habitat. You would make that company put in special booms around their-their drilling equipment in case something does go wrong. If it does fall in the water it-and it floats, at least you'll be able to catch it, and it won't get away and get back in the marsh where it can't be remedied. So it-the-this is the kind of thing that you would do. You would look at preventative measures and allow the drilling to go on.

I think we saw in-in not just the area of-

00:46:51 - 2371

of-of drilling, but in-in other permitting situations, a matter of perhaps two or three absolute "do not do, don't touch, never ever get close to" recommendations a year. You know, absolute denials. Now we would quite often use language that says, don't let Applicant 'A' get away with this unless the permit's conditioned so that, you know, the avoidance is put in place. So the word "denial" would come in there. But it was understood that this is conditioning permit. We're not saying deny it. There's no way to help it. Those are pretty darn rare. Now, I did work one or two that were like that.

00:47:42 - 2371

Matter of-of record, probably the worst permit application ever, ever on the Texas coast was for a super resort development called Playa del Rio. It was to have been built generally on the southern most barrier island on the Texas coast, right across the border from Mexico, between there and-and Brisas Santiago Pass, which is what separates South Padre Island from this little piece of what they call Boca Chica Beach. This was such an egregious project, and involved so many different en-you know, en-

00:48:21 - 2371

endangered species, other natural resources, very shallow bays, mangrove marshes. The fact it's so warm down there that-that even the aquatic vegetation is different from the rest of the state. It's got things that don't grow anywhere else, as well as species that hardly ever are found anywhere else. I believe you mentioned earlier something about the Reddish Egret, the largest concentrations found on the planet, are in the south bay area, in the area that would have been impacted by this project. This thing had an intent to develop twelve thousand

00:49:04 - 2371 four hundred acres, much of it aquatic, almost all of it barrier island, and among the things we stumbled on was that it was going to impact a population of the Piping Plover, a threatened species, that was a significant percentage. I've forgotten exactly what it was. It was at least seven to nine percent of the whole known population. And I wound up dealing primarily with the Endangered Species aspects of that-that project. I wrote what's called a Biological Opinion. Biological Opinions advise the Corps of Engineers if they happen to be the-the federal agency that has the-the premier, you know, processing right to it. In this case, a very big permit. They advise that agency whether

00:49:57 - 2371 they would go ahead with a project, or if they do go ahead, what conditions they should, you know, place upon it. But these things have teeth. They're not advisory the way they were with the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act or the National Environmental Policy Act. These things are do it or drop dead. And I wrote an opinion that for the first time, and maybe the only time, we told the agency this will jeopardize the continued existence of the Piping Plover in its wintering grounds. Now it-this is-this takes a little

00:50:35 - 2371 explanation. There are plenty of places, particularly up around the Great Lakes where the population of the-of the Plover where it nests is so tiny that the species there is actually considered endangered, not just threatened. And there are other places on the east coast, especially, where we have seen biological opinions that say this is a jeopardy because you're impacting them while they nest, while they're most sensitive. So it's a little harder to do that with a wintering population because these are the birds that have got up and left

00:51:05 - 2371

and have arrived, let's say, on the Texas coast in the later part of July. And they hang around until almost June. Now that's wintering? The fact of the matter is, although they don't nest there, they spend the majority of their lives there, or migrating through there. So if you have an impact that continues for the whole of the year, then you can impact a heck of a big chunk, and that's what we saw there. So we said, okay, it's bad enough that you're going to have adverse impacts to the ocelot, the jaguarundi, the brown pelican, the-I believe it was the American peregrine falcon. Some of these-some of these

00:51: 50 - 2371

species are-are still on the-on the brink of extinction, some of them have been brought back and they-are now de-listed. This is-we're about to de-list the-the Bald Eagle. So some are success stories and some are just clinging. But this project, this one project was going to impact them all. I never saw such a-concatenation of-of mess up in one place.

One thing I'd like to mention about it is that it was one of the greatest examples of-of a miscarriage of justice that I have ever seen. There was a key piece of property

00:52:30 - 2371 where Highway 4, this very southern stretch of highway in Texas, runs to the beach. Right at the very end of it, just as it got to the beach, it drops out in an undeveloped area, just, you know, dunes on the other side, that was at one time a state park. It's Boca Chica State Park. Some-some may have heard it called the Boca Chica Recreational Area because it really wasn't a park. Nobody'd had any facilities there. It was just a sign. And-and even-most of the time, that sign wasn't available so you wouldn't have know

00:53:07 - 2371 it unless you had a roadmap. But at one time it was on the road map. Well, this little piece of property happen to be right in the middle of the chunk of this twelve thousand four hundred acre development. And the-the developer went to the owner, which happen to be Texas Park and Wildlife, and said what are the problems, you know, with my making it private? I don't know who he-who he contacted, but Parks and Wildlife's lawyers got a hold of the Texas General Land Offices lawyers, and they researched how it became a park in the first place. It had been state land forever, but it had been, by an

00:53:54 - 2371 act of the state legislature, handed from the General Land Office to Texas Parks and Wildlife for management. And they had forgotten to give a Consideration. This is that legal thing where you give a dollar along with-okay, that hadn't happened. So without contacting the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to tell them that, you know, this had been an oversight, the lawyers for Parks and Wildlife said, mmm, okay, give it back to GLO. GLO says, that's fine. Here, I'll lease it to you, the developer. Afterwards, it was

00:54:26 - 2371

discovered that this occurred that the General Land Office had leased the property without having a public hearing first. GLO says, oh, my. So then they had the public hearing. But the deed had already been done. And we lost-as "we," the citizens of the state of Texas lost the state park. Never knew it happened. Well, to make a long story short, the Savings and Loan debacle occurred. And the developer, along with two of the savings and loans that were financing it, went under.

And eventually the whole property

00:55:03 - 2371

was picked up for a song by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And it is now a part of the refuge system. And there will be no development of it, thank goodness. The Corps didn't believe me when I told them that this had happened, that we'd purchased a big piece of it. They said that can't be. I had to fax them the proof. They thought we'd done it intentionally, but we really hadn't.

DT: You've told us about two different kinds of-of projects that the Fish and Wildlife Service dealt with there on the coast. The oil and gas example that you gave, and then this land development proposal. I was curious if you could talk about a third that's been pretty common and in-and important from what I understand. And that's maintenance dredging up and down...

00:55:52 - 2371

JF: Oh, yes.

DT: ...the coast. Any experience there?

00:55:55: 2371

JF: Maintenance-maintenance dredging, of course the-the Gulf Coast is pretty much surrounded by one big navigational channel. The Intracoastal Waterway. And in Texas, of course it runs from Orange to-to the Port of Brownsville, essentially. So that's a-a big, big area. And a lot of it was dredged before we had environmental rules

00:56:21 - 2371 that really constrained them. Now there have been laws on the books since 1899. The Corps of Engineers has been administering the Rivers and Harbors Act which deals primarily with dredging. But if you go back and you look at that, in 1899, they weren't considered a problem. You know, endangered species hadn't even been defined yet, and wouldn't be, not until-not until 1973. So when maintenance was first looked at under

00:56:53 - 2371 the National Environmental Policy Act in 1975, there really wasn't much known about what it is that you consider. And, you know, we're talking three hundred and some odd miles of channel just in Texas that the Corps was-was addressing and-and in a-impact statement about the maintenance of-of that channel.

DT: This is the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway?

00:57:13 - 2371 JF: This is the Gulf and Intracoastal Waterway. Yeah. As it runs through Texas. They had one-one big document, but it was really out of date. By the time I came along, by the-the-the-the mid 1980's, certainly - it was pretty much obvious to all the agencies that were involved in-in overseeing the maintenance program, except the Core, that there wa-there were big flaws in how they were doing it. They hadn't really looked

00:57:43 - 2371

at some alternatives that would have minimized the impacts that were going on. So in a kind of a round robin thing, a lot of biologists from a lot of agencies, certainly the Fish and Wildlife Service wasn't the only one, nor was I the only one in the Fish and Wildlife Service, got concerned enough, we sat down and-and wrote a letter to the Corps of Engineers telling them you have to really sit down and consider supplementing, you know, essentially rewriting, updating that-that EIS. They didn't do it. But a number of environmental organizations down towards the southern tip of Texas, I believe you

00:58:20 - 2371 mentioned Walt Kittelberger among them, they sued in district court. And I was proud enough, lucky enough to get called in as a witness and explain why this thing was as outdated as it was. Because the environmental laws that were most important, the Clean

00:58:38 - 2371 Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, those were written long after the impact statement was. So it was well overdue for them to supplement it. And the judge agreed. So the judge told the Corps to-to get started. And it took the better part of five or six years for them to complete it. But they did it.

DT: Well, what were the big issues involved in the-the (?)?

00:59:03 - 2371

JF: Well, one of the things that became the biggest by the time it was studied, and it hadn't been that big at the time, but it became that-that big, was that we have a-a number of sea grass beds in south Texas, the vast majority of which are in that last ninety or so miles of the Intracoastal Waterway in the Laguna Madre. That grass is dying back. It's changing in its ecology. And it was assumed that turbidity had something to do with it, because the species that grow in the shallowest areas are being replaced by other

00:59:45 - 2371 species that grow in water normally not so shallow, but can tolerate less light penetration. And a lot of other things are going on. But a number of-of scientific studies seem to be showing turbidity was the reason why this was happening, and the major source of turbidity outside of hurricanes and so forth, the regular source is dredging, and the deposition of dredge material. Well, the Corps of Engineers spent a lot of money in monitoring their process and in modeling what happens. They were able to input things

01:00:23 - 2371 like currents. And they discovered in some places that the dredge material they were depositing here was gone within a year. Where did it go? Back into the channel they just spent millions of dollars dredging, because a cross current carried it there.

The solution? Put the spoil somewhere else. Somewhere where it would stay for years, and not fill up the channel, and not cause them to have problems with tugboats dragging bottom. So,

01:00:53 you know, this was something that was expensive and they had to pump the material further, but it saved them money because they didn't have to pump it as often. And the Corps didn't know this because a district court didn't force them to go and review their process until the late 1980's. So it was a good thing.