SALT LAKE CITY— Conservation advocates have challenged the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s approval of a project that would pump billions of gallons of groundwater from Utah’s West Desert and pipe it to Cedar City, Utah, for domestic, agricultural and industrial use.

The administrative appeal, filed Wednesday, says the Pine Valley Water Supply Project would deplete desert aquifers, threatening critical water resources that support wildlife habitat in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and Utah’s Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge.

“The Cedar City pipeline would put plants and animals in our parks and refuges at real risk,” said Megan Ortiz, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Utah’s West Desert is a place of abundant life and vibrant communities that shouldn’t be treated as a sacrifice zone. We won’t let it be sucked dry to feed more reckless development.”

The project’s draft environmental impact statement, released in 2022, drew strong opposition from local governments, ranchers, Tribes and conservation groups.

The final environmental analysis was released late on Friday, Feb. 27, followed by the record of decision early Monday, March 2. That left people with fewer than six business hours to review the document before the decision was finalized. Typically, the public is given 30 days to review a final environmental analysis.

Hydrologic studies by independent scientists forecast widespread groundwater drawdown from the proposed pumping, threatening springs and wetlands across hundreds of miles.

A similar proposal to pump billions of gallons of water from nearby eastern Nevada to Las Vegas sparked a decades-long fight that ultimately stopped the project.

“The BLM broke numerous environmental laws in its rush to ram this project through. We intend to make the agency follow the law and answer to the people this pipeline will harm,” said Ortiz. “We’ve been working to save the waters of eastern Nevada and western Utah for decades, and we’re ready to do it again.”