about the size of the airport...
Dulles International Airport has three runways: two that are 11,500
feet long and one that is 10,500 feet long, according to the
Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority:
http://www.mwaa.com/dulles/facts.htm. All three runways are 150 feet
wide (personal communication Dulles International Airport by Eric
Dayton, Natural Resources Defense Council, August 2001). The three
cover a total of 115 acres, or 38 acres per runway.. so um yeah.
2000 acres =
1500 football fields
20 Mall of Americas
52 airport runways
According to the U.S.
Geological Survey, oil in the refuge is not concentrated in one large
reservoir within a 2,000-acre area but is spread across its
1.5-million-acre coastal plain in more than 30 small deposits. To produce oil from this vast area, supporting infrastructure would
have to stretch across the coastal plain. Networks of pipelines and
roads obviously would fragment wildlife habitat.
The oil field
industrial sprawl on the North Slope, including drill sites, airports
and roads, and gravel mines has a footprint of 12,000 acres, but it
actually spreads across an area of more than 640,000 acres, or 1,000
square miles.
Proponents of drilling
in the refuge point to the 100-acre Alpine oil field west of Prudhoe
Bay as the state-of-the-art model for developing the refuge. The
2,000-acre "limitation" would allow 20 oil fields the size of Alpine
scattered across the refuge's coastal plain.
Even if the 2,000
acres were contiguous, such an area could cover a lot of ground. For
example, the 12-lane-wide New Jersey Turnpike, which stretches more
than 100 miles across the state, covers only 1,773 acres.
The 2,000-acre
limitation would not include gravel mines or roads. The House's
limitation would allow for 20 oil fields the size of the 100-acre
Alpine oilfield west of Prudhoe Bay, which required a 150-acre gravel
mine and 3 miles of roads. More roads are planned.
Meanwhile, oil companies in the North Slope oil fields excavated gravel
from mines that stretched over 2,000 acres, and then covered 10,000
acres of tundra with gravel for roads, drilling pads and building
foundations.
