Irrigation district predicts early shutoff date

The Weiser Valley Irrigation District reports that irrigation water will be shut off in less than two weeks.
 The District will shut off Crane Creek Reservoir once that water is gone, and will continue trying to draw from the Weiser River, but that source is also nearly depleted, according to the District’s Jay Edwards.
 He said higher than normal temperatures and a lack of precipitation is to blame for the early shutoff.
 “It’s just been a hot summer, so what that means is that we’ll be running on any river water that we have, but the river is almost non-existent,” he told the Weiser Signal American. “If we get some help from some rain, perhaps we will extend it longer, but it looks pretty bleak right now.”
 Edwards said users could help the situation by cutting back on usage. The effort, however, wouldn’t extend the irrigation season much, considering the normal shutoff is around late September or early October.
 “We try to stretch it out as much as we can. If the users cut back, then we can cut back on how much we use, but if you go up there right now, you can see the canal is full of that brown water, that’s Crane Creek water, so it’s kind of going to be a day-by-day basis. If we make it to Sept. 1, it’s going to be a miracle,” he said.
 Edwards said everyone within the District has the same water rights.
 “The District holds all the water rights, that’s for everybody in the District, so everybody shares a proportional amount,” he explained. “So a house in town has the same right as a farmer with 40 acres. If we have a lot of water, everybody gets water. It there isn’t very much water, then they just use that proportionally less. We treat everybody in the District as having the same water rights.”
 Last spring, former Weiser Irrigation District Chairman Vern Lolley, now retired, reported that the snowpack was favorable and that water supply wouldn’t be a problem this season. The ability to provide enough water for farmers and residents, however, also depends on the amount of precipitation received during the spring months, a factor that is hard to predict.
 “What hurt us this year is that we had plenty of snowpack, but we basically had no water in early spring and June,” Edwards said. “There was just no rain at all, so that really hurt.”
 The District historically counts on reserves at Crane Creek Reservoir to help supplement next year’s snowpack and precipitation, but with the reservoir almost empty, it remains to be seen whether it can fill back up. Edwards, however, remained optimistic.
 “The reservoir … typically like this, will be about half full, or maybe a little less than half full, but we anticipate that it will fill,” he said. “The critical thing is the Weiser River drainage. We need to have snow up there and we need to have rain, just to fill the soil up with the profile and keep the river running as long as, and as much as it can.”