While there has been much to write about over the past month, I have been taking a break from posting to fish and recharge my batteries. (Last week’s Deschutes Fisheries Workshop had some really good presentations that I will be diving into soon.) An article in today’s Bulletin, however, has to be commented on. “After a promising spring, drought again stalking Central Oregon farmers“, had some good content but also omitted important elements. As readers of this blog know, I have said all along that the recent winter was not as good as many had been portraying it (e.g., calling it “promising”) and that the drought was not close to being over. Clearly, this impacts more than irrigators, which once again was the only aspect covered by the Bulletin.

By now, most everyone should be familiar with charts from the US Drought Monitor like this one from January 18 of this year. It showed that the Deschutes Basin had normal snowpack and other basins were above normal. In the spring, it showed the Deschutes Basin was well above normal. The fundamental problem with this data is that “normal” is defined as the last 30 years. Of course, that is wildly misleading since the last 30 years have been marked by consistent drought conditions when compared to longer term datasets. For example, the WestWideDroughtTracker from the University of Idaho and others uses a much longer dataset and did not show Oregon’s snowpack reaching “normal” this past winter.

Further, while I am certainly not a hydrologist, I have a basic understanding of local hydrology, and it was obvious that with abnormally dry soil conditions and a depleted aquifer, surface water availability would continue to be problematic. As anticipated, snowmelt went into the ground and we are experiencing another hot summer.

There is some discussion of this in the Bulletin’s article, but it follows articles in the paper stating that the snowpack is good and there should be an increase in surface water. How anyone could believe or report that we would have a good surface water year is puzzling to me.

More problematic, however, is the article’s sole focus of another poor water year on irrigators. Central Oregon’s economy is driven by tourism and new arrivals seeking an improved lifestyle. The impacts of another year of poor surface water availability on fish, wildlife, recreation, and tourism was not even mentioned. Wickiup Reservoir is now only 37% full. Crescent Lake is at 17% of capacity. Prineville Reservoir is the bright spot at 86%, but inflows have essentially stopped while irrigation withdrawals continue at a high rate.

Unless weather patterns change dramatically in the coming years, we are facing a continued and likely worsening water outlook. Yes, irrigators are being impacted, but much of the water delivered to them is not being used in an economically beneficial manner* while wells continue to go dry and fish continue to be killed. It would be nice if the Bulletin wrote more comprehensively about water issues in Central Oregon.

*My adult daughter has a friend who recently inherited property with 5 acres of water rights in Terrebonne. This land is flood irrigated. It is used for watering some fruit trees and sometimes a few cows from a neighbor come over to graze on whatever is growing. Unfortunately, this is common in Central Oregon.