SEATTLE - May 27

 

Environmentalists are ringing alarm bells over a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service draft proposal that could locate a series of new electricity towers and underground pipelines in wildlife-rich corridors.

The federal government plans to unveil next month the proposal to dedicate thousands of miles of federal land in the West for utility corridors, where energy companies in the future could locate new transmission towers or pipelines for oil, gas and hydrogen.

Most will be places already home to gas or electricity lines, but some may cut across undisturbed terrain or through national parks, scenic areas or wildlife-rich lands.

"Alarm bells are ringing on some of these corridors," said Ivan Maluski, conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club in Oregon.

Frustrated by the lengthy process the energy industry faces when it wants to run pipes and power lines, Congress last year gave the Department of Energy and the Bureau of Land Management until August 2007 to set aside energy corridors on federal land in 11 Western states.

This should consolidate permitting for using federal land, although construction will still go through additional environmental review, said Scott Powers, who led the project for the BLM. In some places, construction may be decades away, or never occur at all.

The agencies have held public meetings and issued several reports, but they have declined to release working maps of the proposals until next month.

A map obtained by The Seattle Times appears to suggest that most major corridors in Washington would run along existing highways, such as Highway 2 across Stevens Pass, near where utility lines already cross the Cascades. Another corridor may run near an existing pipeline that borders the McNary Wildlife Refuge.

But it's not clear how much wider those corridors could become, and based on that map, it appears one would run through critical spotted-owl habitat in Oregon's Mount Hood National Forest.

Energy companies have pushed for corridors in California across Death Valley, Joshua Tree and Lassen Volcanic national parks as well as the Mojave National Preserve. Other corridors have been considered for Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Lake Mead National Recreation Area near Las Vegas.

Powers said his group is trying to be environmentally sensitive and, "if at all possible," will avoid siting corridors near national parks, refuges, wilderness areas and wild and scenic rivers. But he said that might not always be possible.

"We're trying to do the best job we can do given the time constraints we have at screening these locations," he said.

The energy industry was positive about the government's work in this area but others were troubled.

"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard," said Howard Wilshire, a retired U.S. Geological Survey scientist. He said his studies, and others, on the effects of roads, power lines and development across the Mojave Desert found that endangered animals such as the desert tortoise were killed during construction.

Utility projects also can fragment habitat or drive animals into new habitat where they are killed by predators, said Gary Sprague, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist.

"From a wildlife perspective, they can be a big deal," Sprague said. "They can disrupt wildlife migrations."

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Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com