This morning, a crew of rescuers from Sea World will try to capture as many as 10 manatees from a canal off the St. Johns River in downtown Jacksonville, to save them from dying when a power plant halts the flow of warm water into the canal.

Depending on how many manatees are netted, it could be the largest rescue ever attempted by the Sea World team, according to Bob Wagoner, Sea World's assistant curator of animal services. Some of the rescued animals may be taken to Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa to recover, and eventually they will be relocated to Blue Springs State Park in Central Florida.

If officials of the Jacksonville Electric Authority were to shut down the 50-year-old riverfront plant while the manatees are still in the water, the manatees would die. And that would violate the federal Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

So at the federal agency's behest, the JEA plant kept running for nearly a week when its electrical output was not needed just to keep the manatees alive. A JEA spokesman said that cost the utility's 335,000 customers at least $100,000.

"We were going to do the right thing," said Bruce Dugan of JEA, the largest municipally owned utility in Florida and the eighth largest in the United States. "We want to see these animals survive."

No one knows how much the rescue will cost but it is unlikely to be cheap. The Sea World crew will number more than a dozen, including a veterinarian to assess the manatees' health once they are plucked from the water. Then there's the price of trucking the animals south and nursing them back to health.

Chuck Underwood, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said JEA will foot much of the bill for the rescue, but Dugan said the company expects to pay only for a crane that will be used to lift the manatees out of the water.

The 250-megawatt JEA plant shut down for a week in November, and JEA officials believed that would be sufficient to encourage any manatees in the vicinity to head south, Dugan said. But when they cranked the plant up in December, a number of manatees -- many of them juveniles, which are especially susceptible to cold -- showed up again.

The young manatees "have never seen a winter this cold and the speculation is that they didn't move south quickly enough," Dugan said.

When state and federal wildlife officials saw that the manatees had returned to the canal, the federal agency dispatched a letter to JEA Dec. 21 recommending that the plant continue to operate "until a rescue can be organized or until these manatees leave under their own accord."

A week later, the federal agency sent JEA officials a sterner letter, noting that the water in the canal was only 61 degrees, "significantly below the critical temperature threshold of 68 degrees needed for survival. Under these conditions it is only a matter of time before these animals succumb to cold stress."

The letter urged the company to make the water warmer while helping organize the rescue.

Dugan said the company is doing the best it can but as the winter has turned colder "even with the plant operating it's not going to be enough."

Yet the rescue itself could be dicey, Wagoner said. The canal is deep, there is no beach to stand on and corralling so many animals at once in nets is going to be tricky, he said.

"It doesn't sound like it's going to be an easy catch," Wagoner said.

The Jacksonville rescue is a dramatic example of the threat to manatee survival posed by the imminent shutdown of older power plants and pulp mills around the state. Manatees, which once did not stray very far north during cold weather, have come to depend on the warm water discharges.

When the old plants shut down, the manatees are slow to adapt. Over the winter of 1997 and 1998, the Jefferson Smurfit cardboard plant in Fernandina Beach changed its factory's cooling system to halt the discharge of warm water. A few manatees moved south but most did not.

"Some animals made repeated visits to the former refuge, apparently looking for warm water," the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission reported. "An unusually large percentage of the region's winter manatee population died when the switch was made, even though the winter was unusually mild."

In an October meeting in St. Pete Beach, the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission expressed concern that the loss of those warm-water discharges as older plants are being replaced or retooled could lead to a massive manatee die-off.

The JEA plant is slated for permanent shutdown in October.

- Staff writer Barbara Behrendt contributed to this story.

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