Wake up, BP, and Restore Wyoming’s Soda Lake There was a sudden
explosion of plants, invertebrates, and mammals (all of which
could crawl under the fence). New, succulent vegetation brought
in pronghorns. With the mass arrival of birds and small mammals
came foxes, coyotes, badgers, and bobcats. “The amazing thing
was that the water didn’t kill birds,” said Rea as we stood over
the dike, now dry and rank with Russian olive. “The inlet basin
was so awful the birds wouldn’t go near it. I did find a dead
pelican there once. By the time the water got into the main lake
it was clean enough that I never saw any significant mortality.”
The new Soda Lake provided a PR gold mine for Amoco. “Yant’s
puddle,” as it came to be called, became national news. True
magazine featured it in an eight-page piece entitled “A Sick
River Is Returned to Nature.” The Oil and Gas Journal gushed
about how Amoco “is willing to match action to words in the
industry’s insistence that energy and the environment can live
in harmony.” And Amo