NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

MORNING REPORT

Thursday, January 14, 2010

INCIDENTS

Everglades NP

Court Awards Park Damages In Vessel Grounding Case

A civil lawsuit between the United States and D.M. was recently settled with D.M. agreeing to compensate Everglades National Park for damages caused by his vessel running aground in Florida Bay. D.M. agreed to pay $295,000 in the suit filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the park. On February 13, 2006, D.M. was operating his 72-foot vessel, the Rebel Yell, en route from Snead Island on Florida's Gulf Coast to Miami. The vessel ran aground on Arsenic Bank in the southwestern portion of Florida Bay within the park. Attempts to power the vessel off the shoal resulted in significant damage to the sea grass environment on the shallow bank. These beds serve as nurseries for lobster, crabs, shrimp and other recreational and commercially important fish and invertebrates. The lawsuit was filed under the Park System Resource Protection Act, which allows the NPS to seek compensation for injuries to park resources and use the recovered funds to restore and monitor such resources. The park will engage in a dynamic restoration program at this site that will include filling in the large holes and planting sea grass. Florida Bay encompasses approximately 300,000 acres of the 1.5 million acres within the park. The entire bay bottom was designated as wilderness by Congress in 1978 and is included in the 1.3-million-acre Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness. [Linda Friar, Public Affairs Officer]

OTHER NEWS

The following stories are among those in today's edition of InsideNPS:

America's Best Idea - Ken Burns' series, “The National Parks: America's Best Idea,” will return for an encore broadcast on PBS this month, with the first episode airing on January 27th. It will then appear on consecutive Wednesdays through March 3rd.

NPS Library Program - John Muir's writings and many other out of copyright and public domain materials relevant to the NPS are freely available from the Internet Archive (IA) with no (or minimal) constraints on use.

National Mall and Memorial Parks - Karen Cucurullo has been selected as deputy superintendent for operations at the National Mall and Memorial Parks. Photo.

NPS Alumni - John Daniel ‘Jack' Linahan, 76, of Custer, South Dakota, passed away on Saturday, January 2nd. Jack was retired from the National Park Service, where he served for 46 years.

To see these and other stories posted on InsideNPS (or NPS Digest, its public version), click on one or the other of the following links (please note that not all stories in the former appear in the latter):

NPS employees: HYPERLINK "http://inside.nps.gov/index.cfm?handler=index" http://inside.nps.gov/index.cfm?handler=index

Non-NPS employees: HYPERLINK "http://home.nps.gov/applications/digest/" http://home.nps.gov/applications/digest/

NPS serious incident submission standards can be found at the following web site: HYPERLINK "http://inside.nps.gov/waso/custompages.cfm?prg=45&id=8728&lv=2&pgid=3504" http://inside.nps.gov/waso/custompages.cfm?prg=45&id=8728&lv=2&pgid=3504

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Prepared by the Division of Law Enforcement, Security and Emergency Services, Washington Office, with the support of the Office of the Chief Information Officer. Edited by Bill Halainen ( HYPERLINK "mailto:Bill_Halainen@nps.gov" Bill_Halainen@nps.gov).

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