Pipeline Plan Seen as a Pipe Dream : Water: An undersea conduit from Alaska to California would be too costly, too environmentally damaging and too ‘far-out,’ a congressional workshop is told.

Water expert Dean Mann didn’t mince words Wednesday when he told a congressional workshop exactly what he thought of a proposal for an undersea pipeline to bring water from Alaska to parched California.

“I think it is really a far-out idea,” said Mann, a former staff member of the National Water Commission. “I think the cost is just so extraordinary that I cannot see it happening.”

Mann joined Alaska Gov. Walter J. Hickel, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and about a dozen representatives of such groups as the Metropolitan Water District, the Sierra Club and the Army Corps of Engineers for the first public discussion on the feasibility of the 1,400-mile pipeline.

Suspended below the ocean’s surface, the pipeline could bring in 5,000 cubic feet of water a second--about 4 million acre-feet a year, a tenth of the state’s water needs. In return for its water, Alaska would get cash and jobs.

Hickel, a former U.S. interior secretary who has been promoting the pipeline since the 1960s, said the workshop is “the furthest the idea has gone.”

Some experts think that Mann’s “far-out” assessment may be nearer the truth: A preliminary report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment concluded that the pipeline is unnecessary and economically and politically unfeasible.

The Fluor Daniel engineering firm described it as a “unique civil engineering undertaking.” Others have said the pipeline, which would carry water inland to Shasta Lake and south via the California Aqueduct, would rank with the Panama Canal in its vastness.

Hickel insisted that the pipeline could be built for half its projected $110-billion cost. He exhorted the panelists to be creative in coming up with ways to make it a reality.

The 18-member panel met under a banner that read “Alaska-California Subsea Water Pipeline” and prominently featured the name of Hahn, its most ardent local supporter. Also on display was a poster featuring a quote from Hickel: “Big Projects Define a Civilization.”

The panelists almost outnumbered the audience. One Orange County pipeline manufacturer took the opportunity to hand out brochures on his product.

Hickel said the project would not take water directly from Alaska’s rivers and lakes but would collect it where it enters the ocean, and “where it’s dumped into the ocean is the least environmentally damaging,” he said.

However, a panelist from the Sierra Club said he hoped that the workshop would end the pipeline idea, which environmentalists consider a costly and superfluous pipe dream.

“It’s a completely ridiculous and unnecessary project,” said Robert Hattoy, the Sierra Club’s regional director. “California has acted like a thirsty vampire,” he said. “This is just putting a faucet on the blood bank. What we have to do is change policies and behavior rather than drain Alaska’s rivers.”

Even some representatives of water delivery agencies said that although the project is technically feasible, cheaper alternatives, such as desalting seawater, are available.

“We have enough water in the state to meet our demands,” said Christine Reed, an MWD board member and former mayor of Santa Monica.

The workshop was sponsored by the Office of Technology Assessment at the request of two representatives from the Southland and one from Alaska. It expects to complete its report by the end of the year.

Harold C. Heinze, Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources--who had awakened to an unexpected Southern California drizzle and joked that back home this would have been a sunny day--used another big project to promote the water pipeline.

“Alaska provides two-thirds of the gas you are driving around on,” he said. “You might be very glad there was a trans-Alaska pipeline.” But Mann, a political science professor at UC Santa Barbara, compared the pipeline to the ill-fated proposal for an American-built supersonic transport jet plane.

“The dramatic issue was the effect of the SST on the ozone, when in fact the fundamental issue was that it was going to cost too much and benefit too few people,” he said.