Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials gave a presentation to the Carbon County Commission July 16 about the TransWest transmission-line project’s visual impact on scenery along Highway 789.
Four potential routes were presented during the meeting. Presented was a route that runs through part of eastern Sweetwater County and part of western Carbon County; another that runs through a small portion of southern Sweetwater County and Carbon County and takes the lines closer Baggs; another that runs through western Carbon County and takes the lines between Baggs and Dixon; and another that runs almost entirely through eastern Sweetwater County.
The BLM prefers the southern Sweetwater and Carbon County route that takes the lines closer to Baggs, known as Route 1-D, and the Carbon County Commission proposed the route that runs through a small portion of eastern Sweetwater County and western Carbon County, known as Route 1-A. The commission is opposed to the route between Baggs and Dixon.
Tuesday’s presentation primarily focused on the BLM’s preferred route, Route 1-D, which takes the lines closer to Baggs. Sharon Knowlton, BLM Project Manager, addressed information on the BLM preferred route’s transmission line visibility from Highway 789, and handed out packets with charts, maps featuring the routes and photographs of actual land areas close to where the lines would go through.
The photographs had two versions, one of what the existing land area currently looks like, and another with what it would look like with lines set in their expected place and shown in the distance. Two pairs of photographs were for the BLM’s preferred route, and two were also for the commission’s proposed route.
“With the BLM’s preferred route, 24 miles of transmission lines could actually be visible at a distance from Highway 789,” Knowlton said. “If you looked off to your west for 24 miles as you’re driving down Highway 789, you’d be able to see it.”
Knowlton said the towers for the project are to be more than 100 feet tall, and not what one is used to seeing on a landscape.
“The towers are 120 to 180 feet tall, and I’d have to say that’s like an 11-story building,” she said. “I don’t know if we even have 11-story buildings in Cheyenne. They’re tall, taller than what the normal high-voltage transmission lines we are used to seeing on the landscape are, which I would have to estimate are 100 feet. So we need to be prepared.”
After discussing the BLM’s preferred route, Commissioner John Johnson asked why the BLM preferred another route, Route 1-D, to the one proposed by the commission and approved by Gov. Matt Mead. Johnson asked what the BLM was trying to mitigate, or what issues were being responded to, when coming up with the route.
While looking at a map of the four routes, Heather Schultz of the BLM Rawlins Field Office said the BLM wanted to look at another alternative that was more realistic than the two less popular routes, which went through Baggs and Dixon or Sweetwater County.
“Everybody knew that there were serious issues with the green line (the Sweetwater County route) and the blue line (the route through Baggs and Dixon), which left the only real alternative as the red line (the route through small portions of Sweetwater and Carbon Counties),” she said. “Part of it was developing another alternative that had some balance to it. Our other concern with the red line is that a lot of the specialists had concerns about the rougher topography and the amount of roads that it would take to build the line, as well as erosion. In talking through it with specialists, they just wanted to have a good comparison of the different impacts, and a different alternative that would reduce some of those impacts and be fairly realistic as an option.”
Schultz said the BLM is taking into consideration what is best for Carbon County.
“It is a huge concern from the BLM, to make sure that we really look at all the possibilities and what makes the most sense,” she said. “Realistically this will become an energy corridor.”
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