Audio
Oral History Interview with Mike Bilecki
Transcript
Abstract: Mike Bilecki began working with NPS at Biscayne National Park as a fisheries biological technician. With his wife working at Big Cypress and a new environmental protection specialist position created, Bilecki moved to Big Cypress to focus on their oil and gas issues. In this oral history interview, Bilecki talks about working with oil companies and Collier Enterprises to monitor their oil extraction and exploration. He goes on to discuss his other responsibilities such as working as a wildlife firefighter conducting prescribed burns and monitoring endangered species; specifically, the red-cockaded woodpecker.
LYNN MOLTEN: This is Lynn Molten at the South Florida Collections Management Center on today, July 12, 2013 talking to Mike Bilecki. Mike, tell me a little bit about how you came to work at Big Cypress, when you started, what your role was, what your position was.
MIKE BILECKI: I was working at Biscayne National Park. I was the commercial fisheries biological technician. My job was to go out and collect data from commercial fishermen. Then I would go over to the Everglades and work with the staff over there to input the data into the commercial fishing database and analyze the data, try to get a handle on what was going on.
When I was over there, I met a number of folks at Everglades. One of the folks I met was Cordell Roy who was doing the Minerals Management Program for Big Cypress out of Everglades. I don't know how long Cordell—I can't remember how long Cordell had been involved with that. He was the environmental protection specialist I think, not only working on Everglades issues but also on the oil and gas issues for Big Cypress.
At any rate, my wife, who was working at Big Cypress at the time–we had been married for about a year–was working as a vegetation management specialist dealing with exotic species. I knew her boss, Bruce Free, who was the chief of resources management at Big Cypress. So, over time, Bruce and I got to know each other. He was talking about possibly creating a position at Big Cypress to deal with oil and gas because Cordell was busy and coming all the way from Everglades to Big Cypress to deal with the issues out there. It was just getting very, very difficult.
Being married to Rebecca, Bruce thought it'd be a great idea if they could hire somebody. I guess he liked what he saw from me personally, my background and stuff. So, he basically put the position out. I applied. I got the position. It was an environmental protection specialist position working for Big Cypress. Almost 95 percent of my job was working on the oil and gas issues at Big Cypress. So, that's how I got there.
While I was there for three years, the first few months or so and then even up until Cordell left–and I can't remember when Cordell left Everglades–Cordell and I worked hand in hand because he had been dealing with it for such a long time. Basically, my job was to visit all of the oil and gas production sites and do the monitoring of those sites. I was the primary liaison with Exxon. It was mostly Exxon at the time that had these rigs out there.
I was basically out there monitoring their operations, collecting data, dealing with spills, and working with the company, not only Exxon but Collier Enterprises who were the mineral rights owners who basically leased out the land to Exxon for their production activities. A lot of the work was going out into the field every day and just going to visit all the sites. It was a very interesting job. I really, really enjoyed the job.
I got a lot of experience in working with private companies, a major company like Exxon, dealing with not only the managers but the landowners working with the crews at the production sites. As time went on, Exxon was getting more and more tests. They had been pumping oil out of there forever. I can't even remember how long oil extraction had been occurring in Big Cypress, but I think dating back to the '40s and '50s, if I remember correctly.
As part of my job, I started to have to learn about the oil and gas regulations associated with the National Park Service. I started learning a lot about the National Environmental Policy Act because every time Exxon wanted to do another well, they had to go through an environmental assessment.
MOLTEN: Were you involved with those assessments?
BILECKI: Yes. I was involved. It was a little bit crazy. If I remember correctly, the Park Service was the one who initially had to do the EA. Then I think we got into a program where they had consultants doing the EAs and we had to review them. But I do remember having to produce some EAs based on other EAs that had been done in the past. That was a very difficult thing to have to accomplish.
MOLTEN: This would be such a different area of expertise from your original role.
BILECKI: Right. Then we started to get very involved with the Minerals Management Program. I mean, we had always been involved with the Minerals Management Program out of the Denver office of the park service. They started helping us. They started thinking that it wasn't up to the park service to do this. It was up to the actual company to put these together. So, not only was I out in the field doing the monitoring of the operations to make sure that they weren't impacting park resources and following the standard operating procedures guidelines that were set up, but it was also working to help refine some of those procedures that they had in place. There were some really loose operations going on out there.
For me, it fits with my personality. I really didn't mind going out there and confronting these guys on things like that. Over time, law enforcement rangers, these are protection rangers, they didn't have a whole lot of time to go out there and monitor. Cordell didn't have a whole lot of time to go out there. So, having myself being the eyes and ears for what was going on out there seemed to bring a little bit higher visibility to what was going on with Exxon for the National Park Service.
As we started seeing more and more some of the things that were loosely followed, as far as procedures go, we started tightening up regulations. Things started getting better for the park service but Exxon and the mineral rights owners were starting to get a little bit this isn't the way we did it in the past. So, we started putting a little bit more pressure on them to do the things that they were supposed to do in the first place.
MOLTEN: What sorts of things were you seeing that you were trying to change?
BILECKI: Especially as it related to spills, I'd go out to a site and see oil on the pad. It was pooling up there. So, I would make notes and make the first contact and say these are the kinds of things that you guys need to start cleaning up immediately as opposed to just letting it sit. Well, you know, it's on the pad. It really doesn't make any difference. There were things like it rains a lot and that stuff gets washed over into the outside of the pad.
There were concerns about the roads that would go into these areas. Some of these roads were a mile, couple miles long and you could see the culverts were failing. The water wasn't flowing the way it was supposed to flow. When they built some of these roads, they built them as dams when they actually should have been built to follow the water flow.
All those kinds of things I've started recognizing and we started tightening up on these guys. They started being concerned that they would have to spend much more attention than they had in the past. Having said that, they recognized they had a permit. They had conditions to the permit. Even if they weren't following the conditions, we could stop their operation. Fortunately for the park, they started fixing a lot of those things that had been lying dormant for a long time. It was only because the park service finally got somebody who was able to go out there more often than not.
MOLTEN: Go ahead
BILECKI: That’s okay I was just trying to figure out what more I need to say about this kind of stuff
MOLTEN: Anything you remember is helpful and interesting. I was just going to ask if there were other companies exploring for oil at that time or was it largely Exxon?
BILECKI: Exxon was doing a lot of exploration. There were others, Shamrock was another one that I remember. Jumping ahead a little bit, after I left Big Cypress in '98 and went out to Denver to work for the Park Service Planning Office, before I had left, there had been a permit application for Shell to come in and do some geophysical exploration. They wanted to use what they called these thumper trucks. They also wanted to set charges in the ground and do these transect of vibrations or sound you know they would set off a line of charges.
They brought me back to Big Cypress for almost five weeks to go out into the field with the Shell crew to monitor. I didn't set up the permit for that. I can’t remember who, actually it might have been the minerals management branch at the time that helped the park set up the permit after I left or maybe I was even working on it before I left. As they developed the permit and the permit conditions, they needed someone to go out there and do the monitoring of the permit. So, they brought me back for about five weeks or so. I followed Shell around. Whether or not Shell ever decided to actually drill for oil, I cannot remember.
MOLTEN: Do you know what year that was that you were back at the park looking at the Shell exploration?
BILECKI: I think it was let’s see I was there ‘85 to ‘88 so it might have been a year later '89 or '90.
MOLTEN: Was that type of exploration unusual in the history of Big Cypress or at least for the years that you had worked there?
BILECKI: I think using these thumper trucks on all the roads, whether it be the access roads to the operation pads that they had out there and then all the roads that go in and out of the park, I don't think they had ever used these thumper trucks on the roads before. But doing the lines of these explosive charges, I think they had done that in the past. But they hadn't done any of that kind of exploration in a long time.
Exxon basically had the information that they had from the various wells that they drilled. Not a good idea and they certainly weren't sharing that with anybody else. But Shell came in and wanted to explore. They had to basically do their own exploratory finding out the information for themselves. Again, this was Collier Corporation that I guess wanted somebody else to come in and see if they could expand the operations.
MOLTEN: Lease more of their rights.
BILECKI: Right, to develop more of their mineral rights.
MOLTEN: Was Exxon at the time primarily exploring around the areas of the existing fields at Raccoon Point and Bear Island?
BILECKI: They had the data that they needed. They would go in, drill a well, and then, depending upon the flow of the well or not, they would either develop it or they would just leave and try someplace else.
MOLTEN: They basically knew where the oil was. They just wanted to see if the flow was strong enough to make it worth extracting.
BILECKI: Exactly. Raccoon Point and Bear Island were the two main areas. I can't remember if Shamrock was in that area also. One of the things that we did do while I was there was an inventory of all of the old well sites.
MOLTEN: Abandoned ones?
BILECKI: I’m sorry? Yeah, abandoned ones, existing and abandoned ones. We did that a lot with aerial photography. We did that with old geologic surveys and maps that had these little dots on them. We did it by going up in a helicopter and scouting out areas where people had told us they had them, even though they might not have shown up on aerial photography or on the maps. That was one of the coolest things that I did when I was there, just trying to develop the inventory of old and existing well sites.
One of the things about the oil in South Florida was that it was mostly used for the material that they used for roofs or the material that they used for roads. It was real low-quality oil, but it saved these companies from having to develop higher grade oil into low grade oil. They just used this low-grade stuff to manufacture the product that would be used either as base for roads or for doing roofing or that kind of thing. So, it wasn't like a real high-quality oil.
MOLTEN: Are they still extracting oil from Big Cypress?
BILECKI: Yes. Exxon sold their operations to Calumet Florida in about '93. And then, they just recently, it looks like about 2010, sold to another operator called BreitBurn. But they are still extracting oil from those two fields.
MOLTEN: Really?
BILECKI: Yeah.
MOLTEN: Wow, that's interesting. I visited Big Cypress about a year and a half or so ago, but I was only there for such a short period of time I was never able to get in touch with any staff or anything to go out there and see what was going on.
BILECKI: It'd probably be a fun comparison with the amount of time passed.
MOLTEN: And to see what's happened to the actual pump operations. Have they been able to make those kinds of things smaller? Has the footprint grown on these things? When was the last time they actually punched a hole in the ground? That kind of stuff would be interesting to know. What else? In terms of staffing, did you work with Greg Hogue or did he come in after you left?
BILECKI: No, Greg was there while I was there. And Greg came in, what was Greg's position?
MOLTEN: By the time Ron Clark started, the person I spoke to who had been there the earliest, Greg was the minerals management specialist. But I don't know what his original role at the park was.
BILECKI: I think Greg came in as the minerals management specialist. He worked for the chief of resources at the time. Is Ron the chief of resources there now?
MOLTEN: He is now, yes. He came in as the environmental specialist sometime after you left.
BILECKI: I think Greg was there while I was there, but we weren't there together that long. There was Dawson, Rick Dawson, Hank and Rick Dawson these guys worked in the southeast regional office. They had a lot to do with this region helping the park deal with some of the issues that we were dealing with.
MOLTEN: They were based out of regional and not out of Big Cypress.
BILECKI: Right. But Greg was at Big Cypress I’m starting to think about it.
MOLTEN: It’s quite a long time ago to recall I was told when I’m interviewing and asking these detailed questions about something that far back because I couldn’t possible answer these things about my own career. But you didn’t work with Greg very extensively?
BILECKI: Who didn’t?
MOLTEN: You didn’t?
BILECKI: Um no. because, no gosh. I would have to think about how that happened. I can’t, I know Greg was there when I was there, but was it, I can’t remember, I can’t remember how all that came about. But Greg then went up, him and Rick left the Park Service and worked for Minerals Management Service I think is where they ended up going.
MOLTEN: The Denver office that had oversight?
BILECKI: No. It was a different DOI office.
MOLTEN: Oh okay.
BILECKI: Because these guys had some extensive policy experience, so they were picked up by the Minerals Management Service is what it was called then. Now it's called BOEM, B-O-E-M, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or something like that. At any rate, Big Cypress was a poster child for, while Big Cypress and Big Thicket were both poster children for the Park Services implementing its minerals management regulations. In that regard, I got a lot of cool experience. Going into meetings with Exxon–the Park Service would be the lead agency. These guys would have to deal with the Park Service and being able to help direct the kinds of things that they should be doing when they're in a national park was interesting.
MOLTEN: Helping establish the standards.
BILECKI: Helping establish the standards, and also seeing how they reacted to the fact that they couldn't do some of the things in the national park service area that they might have been able to do when somebody gives them access to their private property. The issues related to threatened endangered species to water quality, how they got rid of the brine water that they would have to pump out before they actually got to the oil because usually the brine sits on top of where the oil is. They have to get all of that out. In some areas, they pumped it away from the site but not in a park. They had to truck all that stuff out of there.
Of course, with the Florida Panther all of the conditions related to trying to impact as little as possible, not only Florida Panther but all the teeny species that were in the Big Cypress. Sitting down and laying all this stuff out for these guys every time they wanted to punch a hole in the ground was frustrating but at the same time for somebody like me to be sitting down with people representing Exxon Corporation was a little bit intimidating. At the same time, I felt I had the power of protecting the national parks behind me. I did the management at Big Cypress, the management in the region, the management in Denver. They would stand behind everything that we were recommending.
MOLTEN: Did Exxon have to do water quality monitoring at that point in time as part of their permit stipulations?
BILECKI: The only time that we actually asked them to–most of the areas where they were drilling were upland areas. The roads that would come in would certainly go through some freshwater marsh areas of Cypress soils. There might have been a couple places where they actually built pads that were wet, but they weren't wet a lot.
To be honest with you, any monitoring that was done water quality wise would be site specific. You'd take a hack kit out there and you're looking for one thing or another depending upon what release might have happened, whether it was a brine release or an oil release or something like that. But there was really no ongoing water quality monitoring that they were required to do.
As they were drilling, there were drill logs and stuff that they had to keep. They would show me this stuff, but I had no clue what I was looking at, as far as drill monitoring. That didn't really have anything to do with what I was out there monitoring for.
MOLTEN: It didn't tell you much about resource management. Go ahead.
BILECKI: I’m just trying to think of some other things that were involved in that operation.
MOLTEN: You said about 90 percent of your job was oil and gas related. What was the other 10 percent? What kind of things did you work on?
BILECKI: I was also a wildlife firefighter. I got involved in prescribed burning. That was a big part of what I was doing. I helped with planning for the vegetation management specialist. There were issues related to water levels. So, I was working with water resources folks in developing where best to monitor water levels in the park. And when researchers would come in whether it was for, oh panther research work I helped with. Those were the other major things.
Prompt me. Give me some more questions.
MOLTEN: Let’s see we’ve answered a lot of my questions. I was trying to think of changes that would have happened while you were there. I wonder if there is anything I don’t know about.
BILECKI: Let’s see
MOLTEN: You left before they added the addition lands onto the preserve.
BILECKI: That's correct.
MOLTEN: Sounds like.
BILECKI: I got involved, I was pretty heavily involved when I got to the Denver service center, they were doing–I don't know if you know what a GMP is, a General Management-
MOLTEN: Mm-hmm.
BILECKI: The park, just as I was leaving, was starting to get involved with a big General Management Plan [GMP]. When my wife and I decided that it was time to get out of South Florida, I noticed that a position came open. Having worked with a few of the folks who were on the GMP team out of Denver, when I applied for the position at the Denver Service Center in their planning office, I guess they figured that it'd be great to have somebody from Big Cypress to help with their huge General Management Plan project. That's basically how I left Big Cypress, was to go to the Denver Service Center's eastern team planning. I was immediately put on the KNP for Big Cypress.
MOLTEN: You left Big Cypress to work on Big Cypress.
BILECKI: Yes. I got involved in a lot of different other projects but leaving Big Cypress to go to Denver to work on Big Cypress stuff was cool. I thoroughly, it was a perfect opportunity. I actually still have the Big Cypress GMP. At least the 80, anyway I was looking at it this morning trying to think about some of the things we were doing with the oil and gas program.
The other thing I got involved a little bit in is endangered species monitoring for the red-cockaded woodpecker. The helicopter would drop you off way down in the southern part of the preserve. You'd walk around the pine forest looking for that cockaded woodpecker. That was a cool thing to do.
MOLTEN: That's sounds like a fun assignment.
BILECKI: It was. I feel like I have been rambling on
MOLTEN: No, that’s the best when someone rambles, I start off with just a few questions and it leads to things I couldn’t know to ask about just based on most of what I know about you is from the few records I’ve seen so.
BILECKI: What kind of records had you seen that got you to thinking that you needed to talk to me about some things?
MOLTEN: We took a large chunk of everything that was at the minerals management office. They had old records dating all the way back to Cordell Roy and Jim Hollins work on oil and gas from Everglades anything that had been passed on to that office, records that the environmental specialists at Big Cypress made and that the minerals management specialist made. They were starting to have a backlog beyond what was useful.
We took a big collection of that here. I've just been working through those trying to make sense of them, seeing what projects are there, learning a little bit about how the oil and gas permitting worked in the park. Your name was on a bunch of the folders, either on documents reviewing Exxon's compliance or on, I don't what else. It popped up enough that it became clear that you were someone that had worked with the oil and gas program. I could also see that you were earlier than anyone that I had a real history for. You bridged the gap.
We have an interview with Fred Fagergren. He talked a little bit about oil and gas responsibility and how initially it was handled through the Everglades. He brought that up to the point where Cordell Roy was doing it. Then we had this gap between there and—
BILECKI: Fred didn't remember me?
MOLTEN: He just didn't talk about any of the more recent stuff.
BILECKI: Oh, okay.
MOLTEN: He just said this is what happened and then we took it on here at the park ourselves but didn't go into detail about how that was.
BILECKI: Did you ever run across Bruce Free's name?
MOLTEN: I do sometimes, yeah.
BILECKI: He might be a good person for you to also talk with.
MOLTEN: He would have had oversight of the program during those years?
BILECKI: Exactly.
MOLTEN: Great, well, thank you. That's incredibly helpful. You've filled in a hole in our knowledge of what was going on with the park and its relationship to oil and gas during those years.
BILECKI: And so, again, what's the overall goal?
MOLTEN: The goal is we're taking the records and we're going to put them in storage and preserve them, but the ultimate goal is to make them accessible to current oil and gas people or anyone else who might have research interest. To make them useful, one of the things we do is write little descriptions, a little bit of history of the program, a very brief administrative history, and a little bit of description of what's in the records within the different chunks. I could say there are records concerning compliance of the oil companies doing oil operations and also records of their exploring and the various things that were going on.
The more I talk to the people who worked in the program, the better description I can give of what's going on. When I just look at the records themselves, I don't have very good context. I wind up speculating. So, it's really nice to talk to the people who created the records, worked at the program, and get that context for what was happening at the time.
BILECKI: Is this a project that is funded by the National Park Service?
MOLTEN: Yes. I work for a contractor, but this is funded by the National Park Service. These are records that will remain in the repository at the Everglades. The Everglades collections were expanded to include several other of the South Florida parks. They are now all managed under the auspices of what's called the South Florida Collections Management Center, which is just the name for the museum collections and archival collections for those parks. They're housed right here in the Everglades in the Dan Beard Center. They're available to anybody at the parks as well as anyone from the outside who is interested in using them for research. The idea is keep the focus is on resource management records in order to inform future decision making.
BILECKI: There are all kinds of natural cultural resource projects going on between Everglades and Big Cypress and Biscayne. Is this picking at the bigger issue kind of things?
MOLTEN: We're gradually trying to do everything. Right now, it has to do with what we have that hasn't been catalogued yet and what we consider high priority that people would be likely to want to reference, to try to make those available first. This is in a collection of records that's the Big Cypress resource management records. It's trying to get at all those aspects ultimately. This is just one little subset of it.
BILECKI: For example, is there records being developed for restoration of surface water flow for South Florida, Big Cypress, and Everglades?
MOLTEN: Yes, everything that the parks are producing. Ultimately, when they're beyond their period of active use, once they're not actively being used by the people who are making those decisions, then we'll keep those for future reference in the archives here.
BILECKI: Okay, yeah. It sounds like a major project.
MOLTEN: It is. Indeed, it's quite a project.
BILECKI: I'm just curious how it got funded.
MOLTEN: There was an NPS wide funding allocation as a special project for backlog cataloging across the system. So, this has been an effort to do just that, catch up on records that we are currently holding that have been uncatalogued or records that are languishing in offices that could prove useful, but nobody knows what they are or where they are, to try to get a hold of those things, survey them, see what we've got, and make them accessible.
BILECKI: I tried to use that opportunity to try and think of anything else. And I know as soon as I get off the phone with you or when I go home and talk to wife, Rebecca ‘cause I told her I was having this call and she was the vegetation management specialist dealing with all the exotic plant removal programs in Big Cypress for many years. When I tell her that I had this she’s going to say “well did you remember to tell them about?”
BILECKI: Well, if you remember afterwards just shoot me an email and I’ll add that into the information we have.
MOLTEN: Is there a program for the exotic species archival data? That was a huge project at Big Cypress.
MOLTEN: Yes, absolutely, both for Everglades and Big Cypress, all the parks that are working on species. We were just working on–we have a resource management specialist who is retiring. He worked pretty extensively on–
BILECKI: Who was that?
MOLTEN: Skip Snow. He did a lot of work on the invasive pythons. We were taking his records and also trying to get interviews with him and get all the history while it's still right there.
BILECKI: Have you talked with Dr. Jim Snyder on any of this?
MOLTEN: I can't report for the whole program because my portion is such a little part of it. I don't know the entire scope of who we've talked to.
BILECKI: Dr. Snyder has been down there. I guess he still, I think he's working for one of the CEFU's right now, Florida Atlantic maybe. I can't remember. Dr. Snyder had a lot of information as a vegetation person. He had a lot of dealings with the oil and gas program out there also.
MOLTEN: That's good to know. I'll follow up on that. Thank you.
BILECKI: and Deb Jensen?
MOLTEN: I haven't seen that name. Who is she?
BILECKI: Deb Jensen is the wildlife biologist. She is associated with the Panther research. I think she's still there. Deb might be a good person to talk to about oil and gas and the impacts that they've been having on the Florida Panther.
MOLTEN: Great. I will follow up on those things. If you remember things later that were interesting that you wanted to add, just send me an e-mail.
BILECKI: I told you we did this inventory of old well sites. One of the reasons for doing that was to have areas that would need to be restored. Bring it back down to level. Try to get the soil back to a state where natural revegetation might come in. That would be one reason to talk to Dr. Snyder to see if any of that ever occurred.
There was lots of talk about going into some of those areas to do that but while I was there it never happened. It might be a good thing to know whether or not any of that happened. Again, Dr. Snyder would be the person to talk to. Have they reclaimed any of those sites?
As Exxon pulls out development pads, are they responsible for, and I'm sure they are, has there been any reclamation ongoing for those kinds of things? Are there protocols in place? I'm sure there are but while I was there it just never happened.
MOLTEN: I think there is some of that in the later records.
BILECKI: Good. I would be curious to know if they actually went to any of the old abandoned sites and did any reclamation.
MOLTEN: There might have been a push in the mid to late '90s. It looks like there might have been some project funding at Big Cypress to do exactly that type of work.
BILECKI: Dr. Snyder would be a good person to talk to about those kinds of things, if you need to, if the records aren't complete on it, or whatever.
MOLTEN: Great. Thank you for talking to me today. I really appreciate it.
BILECKI: No problem, my pleasure.
[End of Audio]
Description
Mike Bilecki began working with NPS at Biscayne National Park as a fisheries biological technician. In this oral history interview, Bilecki talks about working with oil companies and Collier Enterprises to monitor their oil extraction and exploration. He goes on to discuss his other responsibilities such as working as a wildlife firefighter conducting prescribed burns and monitoring endangered species; specifically, the red-cockaded woodpecker. Interviewed by Lynn Molten on July 12, 2013.
Credit
Big Cypress National Preserve
Date Created
07/12/2013
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