Simple arithmetic (I)

Some more curious line from Dave Bartlett's Polling Week One interview-story with Himself:

The project has received some negative publicity in recent months after one proposed route for the power would have it go through Gros Morne National Park.

But Williams said this is not the preferred route.

[...]

Williams said the Gros Morne route would probably be the cheaper and shorter route, but he said it could be taken off the table if Ottawa would commit to help fund the project.

Set aside the crude and risible attempt at environmental blackmail — Give me Nine Hundred Million DOLLARS! or the bunny-rabbit gets it — and ask yourself a basic question of fact: is the Gros Morne route shorter than the alternative?

This map, taken by cleverly defeating the idiotic copy-protection that NALCO has built into its environmental filings, shows the preferred route for its Lower Churchill outstarve infeed, including the segments that would cross Gros Morne National Park (brown), and the alternate routes to the east of the park (green).

Do your eyes deceive you? No, they do not.

The shortest of several alternate routing options veers off the preferred route just north of Daniel’s Harbour, strikes out more or less directly cross-country, with a few meanders and dog-legs, and reconnects with the preferred route east of Howley. This route is approximately 125 km long.*

The For-the-Love-of-Danny-Don't-Call-It-the-Preferred Route continues west of south down the coast of Newfoundland, through 64 km of Gros Morne National Park crossings, then southeast and east via Deer Lake, along a route roughly paralleling the existing highways and lower-capacity transmission lines. It is approximately 210 km long.*

In other words — according to Nalcor's own documentation — the alternate route down the Northern Peninsula is the shorter route.

* (Nalcor's environmental filing is astonishingly vague on the question of the lengths of the various route options, the following, approximate, figures were arrived at by manually transposing Nalcor's route maps into Toporama. Ed, Danny, given that Nalco is so committed to openness and transparency and whatnot, it would be useful if you would provide a table of those distances, or better still, raw GIS or .kmz files for your adoring public to play with.)