Reservoirs slowly recovering from drought

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By The Associated Press

HOLDREGE — Reservoirs in Nebraska’s Republican and Platte river basins have improved after four to five years of drought, but water levels are still much lower than normal.

So farmers relying on surface water irrigation districts will again have to make due with less water. But the long-term effects of the drought will be different for various parts of the state, speakers said this week at the 2006 Holdrege Water Conference.

Bill Peck, chief of water operations at the Kansas-Nebraska field office in McCook for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, said Thursday that latest drought has been particularly dramatic, he said, because it followed two-decades of wet weather.

Hydrogeologist Jim Goeke of North Platte and the University of Nebraska’s Conservation and Survey Division said soil types, depth to water, connections between aquifers and between groundwater and surface water, and precipitation can all affect an area’s water supply.

Precipitation levels vary greatly across Nebraska, Goeke said, and the trees along the Republican and Platte rivers can consume large amounts of water.

While surface water basins have been hurt by drought, Goeke said the state’s groundwater reserves are being tapped by a growing number of wells. Goeke said that as of August 2005, there were 100,221 high-capacity wells in Nebraska, and he’s not sure that many wells can be sustained.

The varied water levels in different reservoirs along the Republican River reflect the drought’s impact.

Peck said Enders Reservoir in Chase County hasn’t filled since 1968. But Harry Strunk Lake, on Medicine Creek north of Cambridge, has only failed to refill three times in its history.

The Medicine Creek Reservoir is currently 80 percent full and is expected fill by May. It serves Cambridge Canal, the only irrigation system in the basin that received water the past two years, which averages 7.5 inches per acre.

Harlan County Lake is up just 2.5 feet in two years, despite no irrigation releases in the past two years. The last time the 23,000 acres of the Bostwick Irrigation District received any water from the lake was in 2003, and that was only 6.2 inches per acre.

Peck said the supply predictions for this year showed only 1.5 inches of water per acre will be available to farmers in the Bostwick district.

As for the Platte Basin served by the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, water has continued to flow to the 112,000 acres there. But it’s coming in at a lower rate than the normal 18 inches per acre.

The allocation last year was 6.7 inches. This year’s plan is to for 8.4 inches in eight or 10 weeks, said CNPPID Civil Engineering Supervisor Jeremie Kerkman.

Lake McConaughy, which holds 1.7 million acre-feet of water, is now 37 percent full. That’s an increase from the previous two seasons when it ended at 20 percent and 25 percent full.

But Kerkman said inflows have hit historic lows for the last four years because of below-average snowpack in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado and Wyoming the past six years and more groundwater development upstream from Lake McConaughy.

The low water supplies has hurt money flow as well because less hydropower is being generated, Kerkman said. He said it normally provides $4.5 million in revenues annually. Central officials built up reserves during five years of record generation in the late 1990s, which have been tapped during the past five years of lower generation.

He said they hope this year that the current higher-than-normal snow levels in the mountains continues into the more critical spring precipitation season.

If there is a full snowpack and the North Platte Basin reservoirs in Wyoming have enough water to give a full irrigation supply to Panhandle irrigators upstream of the lake, Kerkman said they could take their first steps toward refilling McConaughy this year.