An oil company looking for energy reserves beneath Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida left miles of deeply rutted and damaged wetlands despite requirements calling for immediate mitigation. The company is back in the field now, and environmentalists fear more damage is being done.

Recent photos taken of the routes Burnett Oil Co.'s vibroseis trucks, which can weigh up to 30 tons, took a year ago depict deep wheel ruts ground into the sunbaked soil, trees both run over and cut down, and no sign of attempted mitigation.

"I think (the National Park Service) should have taken more time to study it and do an (environmental impact statement) since this is the first of four phases," Alison Kelly, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Tuesday when asked if the Park Service miscalculated the amount of damage the heavy trucks would inflict. "They didn’t know what they were getting into because they’ve said in documents that this is the largest type of seismic survey ever conducted in the state of Florida. So, we’re pretty much doing a large-scale experiment in the Florida Everglades to see how damaging it is."

Big Cypress embraces a sprawling, humid expanse of subtropical landscape of more than 700,000 acres in the Big Cypress Swamp that contains an amazing, and unusual, assemblage of flora and fauna. There are rare woodpeckers that live in family groups, with youngsters helping to raise their siblings. There's a subspecies of panther (listed as an endangered species nearly five decades ago) that has tenaciously survived despite the steady urbanization of Florida.

This photo was taken by National Park Service observers during the 2017 field survey season at Big Cypress National Preserve/NPS

More than 30 species of orchids grow in Big Cypress, perhaps most notable among them the Ghost orchid that snakes its roots around the trunk of its host tree, anchoring its beautiful flowers. And there is the Everglades Dwarf Siren, a curious salamander with bushy gills that can grow up to 10 inches long.

When the National Park Service under the Obama administration two years ago approved the exploration plan to allow the oil company to search for oil on 110 square miles of Big Cypress, it in effect set up a test of the agency's ability to balance the unimpairment of Big Cypress's resources while also permitting the "enjoyment of privately owned oil and gas interests."

At NRDC, Ms. Kelly said the Park Service should not have allowed Burnett Oil to resume survey operations last month without mitigating the damage from last year's field work. "They forget they have the right as the surface owner to require the least damaging methodology to the surface. We’ve already seen that this is not it," she said.

And the attorney fears the same lack of mitigation will be repeated this field season.

“I can predict what’s going to happen. It’s going to be the same as last year. They’re going to spend the majority of the dry season, which isn’t very long, finishing up their seismic survey and then wait to the end of the dry season to say they’re going to restore, and then they’re going to get caught in the rain like they did last time, and then say, ‘We couldn’t do it, the rain was too bad,'" she said during a phone call from her Washington, D.C., office.

Park Service officials at Big Cypress did not return a phone call Tuesday to discuss the apparent lack of mitigation, and planning and compliance officials in the agency's Southeast Region Office in Atlanta haven't been out to the park to examine the damage and wouldn't comment. But in May 2016, when the Park Service approved Burnett Oil's survey proposal, Ben West, chief of planning at the Park Service's regional office in Atlanta, expressed confidence that the list of 46 mitigations contained in the permitting document were sufficient.

"The more we worked with the applicant, the more we started to overlay an understanding of their operations and, in particular, the suite of those mitigation measures, I think fundamentally that’s what allowed us to feel confident that at the end of the day we didn’t need to do an EIS, that an EA was appropriate," Mr. West told the Traveler at the time. “The range and the commitment of those measures we feel strongly support the record and the ability of us to manage those impacts to below significance.”

Among those 46 mitigations were the following four specific to ground and vegetation disturbances:

17. Low shrubs and herbaceous vegetation, topsoil, rootstock, and plant material will be left in place along source lines, receiver lines, and access routes to facilitate natural re-vegetation. Also, marred or wounded standing trees will be treated with a commercially available, non-toxic pruning paint or wound coating.

18. Ruts, depressions, and vehicle tracks resulting from field operations will be restored to original contour conditions concurrent with daily operations using shovels and rakes to prevent the creation of new trails. Field clean-up activities will begin immediately upon completion of each task, and final clearance will be documented by and coordinated with NPS inspectors to the satisfaction of the Superintendent.

19. Where vegetative trimming is required, areas with native vegetation will be avoided if trimming areas with exotic vegetation can accomplish an acceptable positioning of vibration or receiver points.

20.Trimming native vegetation below the height or beyond the width of 36 inches or with a 4-inch or greater trunk diameter as measured at breast height will be avoided.

Nick Lund, senior manager of the National Parks Conservation Association's Landscape Conservation Program, said a flaw with allowing the trimming of trees 4 inches or greater in diameter at breast height was that many of the trees in the area of Mullet Slough where the survey was conducted are dwarf cypress, which don't grow particularly thick trunks. As a result, many older, well-established trees likely were taken down, he said Tuesday.

“They have a sort of big buttress at the bottom, and then they thin out at the top," Mr. Lund said. "These are not young trees, these are not new trees."

Noting that "the Park Service conditioned the approval of this project on these mitigation measures," the NPCA official said "now that they’ve gone through the first part of phase one, we can see how they did, and they’re not meeting them, they’re just not.”

A call to Collier Resources Co., which owns much of the subsurface mineral rights in Big Cypress, was not returned Tuesday, nor was one to Burnett Oil, which is searching for oil reserves for Collier.

Two years ago, Collier issued a statement to the Traveler that voiced the company's opinion that the exploration would not harm the preserve, at least not when viewed from space.

"Seismic surveying is not new to the area and gives CRC’s lessees the ability to determine more precisely where potential new oil fields are located. There will also be a state-approved biologist and archaeologist on site at all time to instruct crew to avoid disturbing wildlife and cultural sites. And, finally, hundreds of miles of 2-D lines have been surveyed throughout the Big Cypress National Preserve and present-day satellite imagery shows no detectable impacts to the preserve," read the statement.

NRDC and NPCA obtained the following video taken during Burnett Oil's 2017 field work through a Freedom of Information Act request.

At the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, Mike Murray was startled by the 2017 and 2018 photos.

"The photos speak for themselves and confirm our fears that the use of vibroseis trucks would cause extensive damage to the Big Cypress landscape," he wrote Tuesday in an email. "The April 2018 photos, apparently taken months after the damage occurred, raise serious doubts about the effectiveness of the mitigation measures described in the FONSI and likewise about the effectiveness of NPS enforcement of those measures. For example, it is obvious the original contour was not adequately restored concurrent with the date the damage occurred, as required under mitigation measure # 18.

"NPS should not allow any further vibroseis surveys until the damage from previous surveys is fully mitigated as required in the FONSI and Plan of Operation," Mr. Murry added.

Back at NRDC, Ms. Kelly, who spent a decade working on wetlands enforcement for the state of Florida, said the Park Service also required Burnett to measure wetlands function and, if it was deteriorating, do "compensatory mitigation" elsewhere in the preserve to make up for that loss. That has not be done, she said.

"The state of Florida requires you do to a calculation of sorts to demonstrate that you’re in fact replacing enough wetlands to function when you’re doing mitigation, and they haven't done that at all," said Ms. Kelly. "There’s no calculation that’s been done to make sure that there’s no net loss of wetlands function here.”

And she was certain losses were occurring.

"Wetlands are not functioning properly when they have huge swaths driven through and cut down and mowed over. We’re losing wetlands function every single year that they don’t restore it," the attorney said.

The ponderous vibroseis trucks being used for the exploration create ground-penetrating seismic waves by exerting all their weight onto a vibrating steel pad. The shock waves are received by small instruments called "geophones," allowing the geologists to create a three-dimensional map of the underlying ground.

National Park Service observers who watched a demonstration of the vehicles in April 2015 had reservations about their use. During that test -- which Burnett Oil started before the preserve observers arrived -- one of their vibroseis vehicles got mired in a ditch that it tried to cross. It took a call to a nearby oil and gas production site to find a piece of large machinery that could haul it out of the muck and mud. That incident, and concern that Big Cypress' wetlands could pose more problems for the survey, led the preserve's observers to question whether an EIS was merited.

"Extrapolating the impacts observed to multiple vehicles in a much larger area suggests that the potential wetland impacts could be significant," the unidentified Park Service staff wrote. "One purpose for this test was to inform what the unknown impacts for this new technology may be in the wetland environment. When the environmental impacts of an action are unknown, an EIS is usually required. If the test had shown that the impacts were not significant, an EA would be justified. Since the extrapolated impacts could be significant, an EIS may be warranted."

As it turned out, near the end of last year's field season rains arrived earlier than expected and some of the vibroseis trucks got mired down, according to NRDC's Ms. Kelly.

"They got way more rain than they normally do. And it filled Big Cypress up literally like a bowl," she said. "And so they got stuck, and their equipment got stuck. And they were trying to figure out how to get it out, and as they were moving it of course you had fluids leaking all over, hydraulic fluid and oil and everything else leaking not just from the big trucks, the machines to do the vibroseis, but (also) the accompanying off-road vehicles for the survey crews."

While the attorney didn't know how many miles of rutted tread trails were left behind by the 2017 field work, she "can’t imagine ever seeing this level of damage to wetlands in a national park unit. It’s astonishing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”