Can national parks safely reopen? Lawmaker calls COVID-19 plan ‘wholly insufficient’
National Parks are opening their gates again, but is it safe?
House Committee on Natural Resources Chair Raúl M. Grijalva doesn’t think so, and he wrote a letter to Department of the Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and National Park Service Deputy Director David Vela expressing his concerns on Friday.
Several national parks across the country announced plans to begin welcoming guests again after coronavirus closed their gates, McClatchy News reported. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most popular park in the country, reopened last week, according to McClatchy News.
“At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, parking lots were immediately overfilled by visitors originating from 24 different states, many without masks,” Grijalva said in the letter. “Evidently, the safeguards the NPS has implemented to protect employee and visitor safety at reopened sites are wholly insufficient to protect public health.”
Many of the parks’ plans involve a phased reopening with only some areas of the park open and few, if any, overnight accommodations, according to McClatchy News. Visitors are also encouraged to practice social distancing and wear a face mask.
The National Park Service announced in March that it would waive all entrance fees, McClatchy News reported.
Grijalva said that the House Committee has “expressed numerous concerns with the administration’s encouragement of public lands visits.”
“Following President Donald Trump’s announcement that the administration ‘will begin to reopen our national parks and public lands,’ the Committee sent a letter on April 27, 2020, requesting documentation and information detailing how (the Department of Interior) will determine when it is appropriate to reopen parks and other public land sites,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, your response failed to provide any of the requested documentation and provided no information on the reopening plans.”
Grijalva also pointed out that COVID-19 has “disproportionately impacted” tribal and rural communities. He said the Navajo Nation asked the National Park Service to delay the reopening of Grand Canyon National Park, but the park announced its plans to reopen less than a week later, according to the letter.
“Ensuring the safety of NPS employees, visitors, and gateway communities is your responsibility, and human safety must take precedence over any politically motivated decisions to reopen national park sites,” Grijalva wrote. “It is long past time for the administration to heed calls from those elected to represent the communities that live closest to our public lands and to prioritize public health and safety above all else.”
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 4:46 PM with the headline "Can national parks safely reopen? Lawmaker calls COVID-19 plan ‘wholly insufficient’."