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What caused the drought?
An off-Project irrigator, Bureau of Reclamation official provide different takes
By ELON GLUCKLICH
H&N Staff Reporter
December 19, 2010
Some irrigation districts released water
a month after their usual date. Other
districts released no water at all.
Drought conditions were real, but the cause of the drought is a matter of contentious debate among some members of the local community.
Most irrigation officials blame the
drought on below average rain and
But some landowners say they feel the drought was bureaucracy-driven — the result of burdensome rules and regulations that placed wildlife habitats in higher esteem than farmers and ranchers.
Following are two takes on the 2010 Klamath Basin drought.
TOM MALLAMS, president, Klamath Off-Project Water Users
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H&N photo by Elon Glucklich Tom Mallams, president of the Klamath Off-Project Water Users, believes the drought was political.
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“This whole thing was political,” said Tom Mallams, an off-Project irrigator and president of the Klamath Off-Project Water Users.
Mallams thinks any drought conditions that existed this year could have been avoided with better planning among Bureau of Reclamation officials and local irrigation district administrators.
Mallams noted river inflows at the start of the season were between 75 and 80 percent of normal capacity. But federal environmental regulations require lake water to meet certain quality standards and one way to reach those requirements is through flushing, Mallams said. Flushing causes some level of evaporation, lowering the overall water supply.
“Flushing” describes the passage of water through channels at a high enough velocity to remove harmful pollutants. It’s a process that could be avoided, Mallams said, preserving resources for hundreds of farmers and ranchers.
“It’s because (the Bureau of
Reclamation) was dumping water. That’s
my feeling,” he said about why drought
conditions occurred. “I believe this
much water doesn’t need to be flushed
down.”
PETE LUCERO,
spokesman, Bureau of Reclamation,
Mid-Pacific Region
Drought conditions in the Klamath Basin were real, said Pete Lucero, spokesman with the Bureau of Reclamation’s Mid-Pacific Region.
“The irrigation season began with only
57 percent of average peak snowpack and
an Upper Klamath Lake level
approximately 2.7 feet below the minimum
necessary to begin irrigation,” he said.
Few were spared from the drought’s impact, though Bureau of Reclamation officials were working around the clock to try to mitigate its effects, he said.
Still, there isn’t much an official can
do to counter the forces of nature.
“The fact that we had low precipitation and low snowfall, and that the tributaries into the Upper Klamath Lake did not produce as much as we would have hoped” were responsible for drought conditions in 2010, Lucero said.
The 2010 water year was the fifth worst in the past half-century, Lucero said. Klamath Falls received just more than half the precipitation it usually receives, during the 2009-10 winter.
The result? Less water distributed across the Basin’s vast farmlands. There weren’t many actions Bureau of Reclamation officials could take, other than press for government assistance, he said.
Lucero said he hopes the federal government won’t have to step in next year, as it did in 2010, when hundreds of irrigators were subsidized to leave parts of their land dry.
“I think we’re getting a good amount of
snow,” he said. “We’re really looking
forward to a good year in 2011.”
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