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. 1 ~ 0"- Whoops! Here We Go! \~~e half dozen years ago. the State of Nebraska filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court at Omaha against the Gray- rocks Reservoir construction project at WheaUand on the grounds it posed an environ- mental threat to Platte River wildlife downstream in that state. The suit brought by the then governor of Nebraska and its attorney general was really a suit against construction of the Missouri Basin Power Project, one of whose princi- pals oddly enough was the city of Lincoln, capital of the state in which the suit was filed. Everyone knows, or should know, what happened in that instance; Basin Electric Power Cooperative Inc., the project manager for the $1.6 billion MBPP project, had to cough up $7 million of what would come from its custom- ers'rates for "blood money" for Nebraska to provide fund- ing for improving a refuge for whooping cranes that use a portion of the Platte in the middle of Nebraska midway on their annual migration routes between the far north and more southern climes, mainly along the Texas Gull Coast. One would think the whoop- ing cranes, an endangered species, would have been somewhat adequately accom- modated by that $7 million, but apparently not. Now a federal judge in Denver, John L. Kane Jr., who is something of an envi- ronmentalist judging from the wildlife pictures hanging on the walls of his courtroom, has ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is legally empowered to halt the con- struction of a dam on the South Platte Rh'er in north- eastern Colorado because it poses a threat to the whoopers - and whcre else but in cen- tral Nebraska. The Public Service Compa- sany of Colorado which built a coal-fired generating plant near Brush somewhat simi- lar, although of smaller ca- pacity, to the Wheatland plant, joined with an irriga- tion district to build the dam near Brush to both supply the Pawnee Station generating plant owned by PSC and the irrigation district with water. But along came the U.S. Fish and Wildli1e Service which said that the dam could endanger the whooping cranes' nesting area, presu- mably the same nesting area that supposedly was "endan- gered" by the Missouri Basin Power Project and that Basin Electric paid out $7 million in the form of balm to cure. The news story says the study by the Fish & Wildlife Service warns the dam could endanger the whoopers' hab- itat, it doesn't say flat out that it would do so. We ask, what. ever happened to the MBPP whooping crane money? Didn't it cure the whoopers' problem? Or do the whoopers automatically go into a threatened posture everytime somebody tries to build a dam or other water project on the upper reaches of the Platte River We have a lot of sympathy for the plight of the whooping, cranes, but there are only 15 or so of them. Are these same birds to be trotted out and pointed to with alarm, alarm that is they will be zonked by some water project hundreds of miles removed from their nesting grounds, everytime one of these projects is planned? Furthermore, since it is to be considered that they are in no greater peril of ex' tinction from the building of the PSC dam at Brush, or the MBPP's Grayrocks Reservoir for that matter, or any other such undertaking, unless it to- tally shuts off the Platte's water supply which is most unlikely, than they are from other causes. This sounds suspiciously like the case of the humpback chub and the Colorado squaw fish that the Fish & Wildlife Service perceived as threatened by the construc- tion of the Cheyenne Stage U water project on the headwa. ters of the Little Snake River, an absurd situation involving two trash fish that had been the target of removal by fish management experts for some time before it was de- cided they were endangered species. Do bureaucrats spend all their time sitting around try- ing to think up these things, or are they really deadly serious aboutthem? Whatever the situation, what it all adds up to is that ul- tim a tely the public will be charged with paying the costs of this bureaucratic nonsense as the people ~ious1y are being made to pay ill the Grayrocks Reservoir case, without any real assurance that the problem sought to be addressed will be benefited in anyway. , What indeed is the cause of the whooping cranes' plight? Does anybody really know? We doubt it; the goveniment, however, manages to spend huge amounts of money in a mostly vain effort to save these endangered species with little hope of success probably because it is one of those cases where a crea- ture's time has come. . - Wy ~'TATE. T~\ ~L)....jE 8/3/83 C-31