Drought conditions east of the Cascade crest are so dire that state officials plan to cut off water for farmers, ranchers and more, something they’ve never done before.
Reservoirs in the Yakima River Basin are expected to run out of water early next week, officials with the Washington Department of Ecology said in a release. To conserve what little water remains for fish and senior water rights holders in the 6,100-square-mile basin, the state will halt surface water use, including water drawn from rivers, streams and reservoirs, on Monday through the end of the month.
The drastic measure comes on the tail end of Washington’s third severe drought in a row, which has hit the south central portion of the state particularly hard. The Yakima River basin serves as an important habitat for a wide variety of fish and wildlife, but it’s also home to some of the state’s most fertile cropland.
“We have not experienced a drought like this in over 30 years,” Ria Berns, Ecology’s Water Resources program manager, said in a statement.
The impending cuts could mean more than 1,500 water rights holders would see their supply fall short this year, the release said.
Farmers, ranchers and other irrigators use surface water when they draw from rivers, streams and reservoirs. Others might have rights to draw from groundwater — stored in aquifers — but across the American West those groundwater supplies are also drying up.
The news comes as salt in the wound for many farmers and irrigators in the area, who watched as the landscape started the year off dry and quickly worsened. All the while their forecasted water supply ticked steadily downward. Ultimately, reservoirs in the basin sank to historic lows this year and water rights holders received only a fraction of the resource for which they had hoped. This cut growing seasons short and shriveled the variety of crops grown this year throughout the area.
Every corner of the state is currently in drought and more than a quarter of the area is considered to be in extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. State officials declared their third drought emergency in a row this year before the summer began and expanded the order’s coverage area in June.
These cuts are necessary to save at least some water for fish in these waterways and for senior water rights holders, who are last in line to face these sorts of orders, Berns said.
The 100,000-acre Sunnyside Irrigation District will begin shutting down Sunday, cutting its season short by nearly two weeks, said district manager David Felman. Farmers in the district grow a number of things, including forage crops, hops and grapes.
This year sits among the worst droughts ever seen by the region, Felman said.
Crop yields suffered thanks to water shortages throughout the year, Felman said. But losing out on end-of-season irrigation means perennial crops will have a tougher time over the winter and into next season.
With these repeated and compounding droughts, farms must suffer through more and more stress, Felman said. The conditions aren’t sustainable and the parched region will require quite a bit of snow and rain in order to claw back out of the red.
The impending cuts will have less of an impact on the Roza Irrigation District, however, said district manager Scott Revell. That’s because farmers there ran out of water last month.
The drought cut Roza’s season short by a full month, Revell said.
“This is the worst of my career, I can tell you that,” he said.
In a particularly dry year, Roza can shut its water off early in the season to conserve the resource, lease additional water for the hotter months and implement other strategies to increase water-use efficiency, Revell said.
The district did all that this year, Revell said, and still it ran out of water.
The basin needs much more than its normal wintertime precipitation levels to bounce back from the depths of this drought, Revell said.
But that’s unlikely for the coming winter. Hydrologists expect snow droughts to hit the region about four years in every decade moving forward.
Barring a total recovery, Revell said he’d be happy with even nominal gains, settling for 70% or 80% of his regular water supply.
“Compared to 40% that looks pretty good,” he said.
