Northwest water supplies rely on storage, conservation
By HAL McCUNE East Oregonian Publishing Group
Forest Service hydrologist Caty Clifton likes to cite this truism about the West and water: “It’s always too much or too little.”
Climate change prompted by global warming is expected to exacerbate that dilemma, reducing snowpacks in the Northwest, speeding up mountain runoff and bringing more rain in the winter but less in the summer.
The net result: “We expect more water early (in the winter) and less water later (in the summer),” said Mike Ladd of Pendleton, regional manager of the Oregon Water Resources Department.
Or, as Northwest climate change scientist L. Ruby Leung puts it, “We’ll have more rain when we don’t need it, and less when we do,” increasing the probability of winter floods and summer droughts.
“The challenge is in how we adapt,” said Clifton, who works at the Umatilla National Forest in Pendleton. “We’re tinkering with the plumbing system to try to adapt.”
But it boils down to two options: Store more water when it’s plentiful for times when it’s not, or reduce the amount of water needed through conservation.
“The amount of water in streams or in the ground is a function of the amount of precipitation that falls to the basin and the water management practices of water users in the basin,” said Kate Ely, the Umatilla Basin hydrologist for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
Management includes how water is used, diverted and redistributed, and developed.
“We can create offstream reservoirs to catch surface runoff in the winter and use this water for both instream and out-of-stream uses and develop aquifer storage and recovery (known as ASR technology) programs to recharge the basalt aquifers,” Ely added. “Or we can learn to conserve water so that our demands are less.”
Neither is going to be easy, nor cheap.
Storage is an issue
The dams along the Columbia River helped transform northeast Oregon and Southwest Washington from sparsely populated afterthoughts into bustling economies with bright futures. But the era of such massive public projects appears long over.
When people talk of expanding water storage capacity today, it’s generally far smaller projects than those that regulate the Columbia and Snake rivers.
There are two reasons.
“Storage is one solution” to shifting water cycles and increasing demand, said Clifton. “But it has a big environmental impact, and it’s very expensive.”
There is some potential for small storage projects in mountain watersheds, she admitted, but they would require extensive mitigation efforts to ease the harm to fish and wildlife. This makes them politically touchy as well as costly, often prohibitively so in a time of shrinking budgets and federal matches.
Considering climate change, Ladd agreed the time may be right to look at additional storage capacity. But the first step must be “a comprehensive study of what storage sites are available” and the changing cycle of stream flows, as well as a review of the need for water, based primarily on crop production.
There is often excess water available in the Columbia during winter runoff, Ladd said, but he reiterated that storage projects “must be environmentally friendly and they take tremendous funding to pull them off. We’ll need a much more cooperative effort than ever before.”
That kind of cooperation may be coming together in Washington’s Yakima Valley.
Both severe drought and flooding in the 1990s convinced irrigation districts, municipalities and civic leaders that more water storage was needed. They convinced the 2003 Washington Legislature to appropriate $4 million for an assessment of the Black Rock Alternative, which would pump Columbia River water through two ridges for storage in a natural 10-mile-long “bathtub” between the Columbia and Yakima Valley. It would require a mile-long dam at one end.
The Bureau of Reclamation concluded Black Rock is technically viable. It’s politically viable because it would improve fish habitat by leaving up to 869,000 acre feet in the Yakima River rather than pulling it out for irrigation. That would restore the flow regimen of the Yakima and Naches rivers to near-natural levels, while Black Rock would ensure adequate water for irrigators and municipal growth.
The intention is to provide not less than 70 percent of junior water rights, said Tom Myrum of the Washington State Water Resources Association.
But creating the 1 million acre-feet reservoir has an estimated price tag of about $4 billion and annual pumping costs of about $60 million, which could be offset by power generation from the dam, Myrum said.
Oregon is eager to evaluate both above- and below-ground storage possibilities, Ladd said, noting the city of Pendleton’s successful ASR program. The advantage of aquifer storage is that “it’s already built,” he said.
Aquifer storage likely holds the greatest potential for that reason. And it could be a way for Umatilla County to take advantage of the Columbia. The county, Port of Umatilla and city of Umatilla are joining to study the feasibility of an ASR program.
The city and port have about 150 cubic feet per second of unused annual water rights from the Columbia that could be pumped into confined basalt aquifers in the winter and spring and used to “meet human demands and to reduce stresses on habitat that commonly occur in the summer months,” according to a proposal for evaluation.
Conservation wisdom
Water conservation encompasses a lot more than simply using less water.
For the Water Resources Department it includes following a sustainability plan to “promote wise long-term water management, provide for streamflow restoration, address Oregon’s water supply needs and ensure we do business in a way that minimizes our impact on the environment.”
That includes everything from increasing the public’s understanding of sustainable practices and promoting long-term water planning by municipalities and other water users, to reducing the agency’s individual impact on the environment, such as by using less paper.
Clifton of the Forest Service said conservation goes hand-in-hand with public policy and watershed management.
“The forest is a remarkable resource,” she said, noting that 100 years ago Congress agreed national forests must be managed to protect the source of water and provide a steady flow of timber. “We continue to fulfill that mission today.”
That makes sense in northeast Oregon. While only 14 percent of the Umatilla Basin is national forest, that land produces more than half of the water in the basin. That’s true throughout the West, where two-thirds of the water supply comes from forest land.
The challenge is managing healthy forests in balance with the climate, vegetation and animal species, Clifton said. But even with aggressive management, the Forest Service predicts it will take decades at current funding to overcome past practices that hindered watersheds.
For starters, development in the forests must be limited, Clifton said. “We have more roads than we need now.”
Groups like the Oregon Water Trust are helping society find a balance between the demands of man and nature. OWT’s mission is to restore surface water flows for healthier streams in Oregon by using “cooperative, free-market solutions,” said Executive Director Fritz Paulus. One tactic is to pay landowners to leave water for fish.
For example, ranchers Pat and Hedy Voigt recently agreed to permanently shorten their irrigation season by 40 percent to leave water in the middle fork of the John Day River in late summer – when fish need it most.
