Poudre River listed among nation's most endangered

FORT COLLINS — The Cache La Poudre on Thursday was named among the nation’s 10 most endangered rivers, further fueling environmentalists’ opposition to a plan to build a $400 million reservoir north of Fort Collins.

Calling it a sad day for Fort Collins, members of the Save the Poudre Coalition staged a press conference along the Poudre River near downtown.

Gary Wockner, the group’s spokesman, said the reservoir, to be slightly larger than Horsetooth Reservoir west of Fort Collins, said the Poudre was named endangered because of the threat posed by the storage project.

“It will further drain this river, it will severely degrade the investment this community has made in the river corridor, it will threaten Fort Collins’ downtown economy, it will bathe northern Colorado communities in debt, it will dry up farms and it won’t solve our long-term water supply challenges,” Wockner said. “Draining the Poudre is not the answer.”

But a representative with the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which has proposed the project, said no water would be diverted unless minimum streamflows are being met. Brian Werner said the reservoir is vital to the water-storage needs of 11 northern Colorado communities and four water districts.

The region has doubled its population over the past 30 years, Werner said, and the 15 partners’ water needs are expected to increase almost three-fold by 2050.

“We haven’t built a new storage facility in 30 years,” he said. “”Sooner or later you’ve got to build some infrastructure and we’re proposing that this makes the most sense — economic and environmental sense — for what those communities desperately need.”