Demolition

Amanda Peacher at Oregon Public Broadcasting on some of what the Bundy gang accomplished this week:

The armed occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge continue to use government equipment inside the complex.

One militant, who refused to give his name, again plowed dirt with a refuge bulldozer Wednesday. He wouldn’t say why he was operating the machinery, but in several places, sagebrush and vegetation had been newly removed, leaving wide patches of bare mud within the complex.

He said the road was already there, and the Bundy gang had just been removing snow from it. That was a big fat lie.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed Thursday that not only is the road built last week by the occupiers new, but it is also within an archaeological site important to the Burns Paiute Tribe.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service assistant director of external affairs, Jason Holm, condemned the militants last week for what he called “disgusting, ghoulish behavior.”

They removed part of a fence to create the short access road.

That fence was in place “as a deterrent to keep fire crews from driving across the archaeological site,” said Holm.

So that it wouldn’t be damaged, you see.

It appears militants moved rocks from an existing gravel pile in the compound to surface the road.

“It was just a goat trail before,” one militant told OPB, who also declined to provide his name. “People were slipping and falling.”

People who aren’t supposed to be there, people who have invaded the wildlife refuge in order to steal it and destroy it for anything other than grazing their cattle for their profit. If I break into your house and find the kitchen floor slippery, I don’t get to install a new road through it.

Kevin Foerster, the agency’s Pacific region chief, also denounced the construction.

“There’s a reason why there’s not a road there,” said Foerster. “If there was a need for a road in that particular location, we would have over the past 108 years put a road in that location.”

The agency said the action is likely a violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, also known as the ARPA.

“Even disturbing 3 to 4 inches on the surface is an ARPA violation,” said Holm. “Investigators will have to excavate to determine depth of disturbance in several areas to understand the extent of the damage.”

You know who else does this? Destroys archaeological sites? Islamic State. The Taliban. That’s who.

 

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