LOS ANGELES, April 28 (UPI) -- Construction of a solar project in California has been halted because 600 endangered desert tortoises could die as a result of the project, authorities said.
The Obama administration halted the building of two-thirds of the project in San Bernardino's Mojave Desert after a U.S. Bureau of Land Management assessment disputed the estimate by BrightSource Energy, developer of the plant, that only 38 of the reptiles would be disturbed by construction at the 5.6 square-mile Ivanpah Valley site, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.
Construction activity on most of the 392-megawatt solar thermal project has been suspended until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service redrafts a previous scientific opinion on the effect on the tortoise.
That could come as soon as next month, officials said.
BrightSource company spokesman Keely Wachs said the government projections "are not consistent with the actual numbers of tortoise found on the project site."
"It appears that the largest concentrations of tortoise are outside the project and in areas that we designed the project to avoid," Wachs said.
However, the BLM's assessment estimates more than 3,000 acres of tortoise habitat would be destroyed during construction.
