Letters regarding missing Patoka Wildlife Refuge maps or map data.

Stop I-69 Interstate - COUNT US! County Under New Terrain I-69

COUNT US! Objects to insufficient access and inaccurate mapping of
the Patoka Wildlife Refuge and Management Area.

(Back to maps)

In early 2003, then INDOT Commissioner J. Brian Nicol released the official state highway map with I-69 with proposed I-69 drawn in. (We found it interesting that other major INDOT approved projects were not included on the map.) Many were outraged, but we saw it as just another political act by one schooled in Political Science to further his war on our psyche.

Some months later, it came to our attention that he/INDOT had left the Patoka Wildlife Refuge off of this same map. This seemed significant since I-69 bisects the Patoka Wildlife Refuge, a NEPA protected area. Since this was seen a purely a political tool of INDOT, COUNT US! chose not to give INDOT's J.Brian Nicol the satisfaction of our complaint.

By February of 2002 political changes resulted in the removal of INDOT Commissioner J. Brian Nicol and regarding the Patoka Wildlife Refuge we discovered:

US Federal Highway Administration does not include the purchase boundaries on its web site.
US Fish and Wildlife Service does not include maps of the Patoka Wildlife Refuge.
US Fish and Wildlife Service Midwest web pages are missing all image files.
Indiana Geological Survey maps of the region provided by the INDOT consultant for I-69, Bernardin, Lochmueller and associates has a very important parcel of the USFWS Patoka Reserve purchased area missing. (BLA has some history of dropping essential information in this study.)

So we wrote letters and received several responses.

Midwest Fish and Wildlife Service	Our letter	FWS Response

Our letter to->	......	Executive Secretariat US FHWA	cc:INDOT	cc: US Fish and Wildlife Service	cc EPA
		No response	No response	No response	No response
Our Second letter		U.S. FHWA Acknowledgment FHWA Indiana Division response	Responses Acknowledgment Commissioner Sharp html or PDF


USFWLS letter sent to FHWA		FHWA response

Our Letter to the Indiana Geological Survey	Response

We are now wondering why the Indiana Geological Survey map provided by Bernardin, Lochmueller (BLA) and associates are lacking a most endangered section of the Patoka Wildlife Refuge that is included in other BLA I-69 study maps. To the right of the darkened line in the table above.

This reminds us of missing Karst data found by Indiana University scientists http://www.i69tour.org/feis/karst94.pdf