Ambitious Dam Would ‘Borrow’ Water From Columbia River

If the Black Rock reservoir ever gets built, Dick Prigmore says his little way-station out in the middle of nowhere will be buried under 700 feet of dirt.

“I don’t think I’ll be alive by the time this thing is going to happen,” says the 64-year-old owner of the Silver Dollar cafe-tavern-convenience store, which stands alone at the intersection of Washington 24 and 241.

The drought of 2001 gave new life to the dam dream, which has been talked about off and on since the previous big drought in 1977.

The proposal is this: For the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, build new water storage in the arid, irrigated orchard country of the Yakima River basin.

“Right now, it’s an idea in its first baby steps,” says Gary Ballew, Benton County’s sustainable development manager and the current point man on Black Rock. “It seems like an idea that has some merit.”

In its grandest form, the off-stream dam would be one of the largest of its kind in the world--595 feet high with a capacity to store 1.7-million acre-feet of water. An acre-foot of water is what it would take to cover an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot.

Proposed for the Black Rock Valley, wedged between the Hanford nuclear reservation, the Yakima Training Center and the Yakama Nation reservation, the reservoir would draw water from the Columbia River and return it to a tributary, the Yakima River.

But the price tag is staggering--as much as $1.6 billion, the same as the cost for two proposed baseball stadiums in New York for the Yankees and the Mets.

Ballew smiles. “That’s really cheap”--relatively speaking, he said.

Pine Hollow, another proposed, smaller reservoir project for central Washington, is estimated to run about $3,000 per acre-foot.

But to find the money to do it, the project would have to have the support of just about everybody: several federal agencies, Congress, the state, tribes, environmentalists and farmers.

“There’s no one we don’t need,” Ballew said.

The Evergreen State lives with a feast-then-famine cycle of precipitation. Most of it comes in the late fall and winter, but the dry months of July and August are when farmers need water the most.

Nor is water evenly distributed across the state. Some parts of the coast get more than 200 inches of rain annually, while parts of central Washington’s high desert get fewer than 8 inches.

Reservoirs are a way to bank water for those not-so-rainy days.

Benton County has taken the lead for the time being on Black Rock, budgeting $500,000 for study and related costs. Neighboring Yakima County, which includes the Black Rock Valley, has agreed to pitch in $100,000.

Gov. Gary Locke has promised $500,000 out of $2 million in federal money he’s dedicated to water storage, and the Benton County Farm Bureau kicked in $10,000.

As envisioned, Black Rock reservoir would hold water sucked out of the Columbia, then piped into the Roza Irrigation District system in the lower Yakima Valley.

“We are receptive to it being explored as a reservoir site,” said Joye Redfield-Wilder, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Ecology in Yakima.

But, she said, there are lots of questions still to be answered: How would it affect water rights on the Columbia River? Can water for the reservoir be taken out of the river without affecting hydroelectric operations or spawning fish?

Would migrating fish be confused if water were pulled from the Columbia River and sent back into the Yakima River? Is the geology of the area right for such a project?

“Those are some of the issues we felt they would need to look into,” she said.

During last year’s drought emergency, the Roza Irrigation District, which irrigates 72,500 acres, only received 37% of the water it gets in a normal year from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation-run Yakima Project.

The region needs more water storage because the existing supply is over-appropriated, said Tom Monroe, operations manager for the Sunnyside-based district. The seven-reservoir system in the project holds a little over a million acre-feet of water and the demand is a little over 2.3 million acre-feet.

Irrigation, protective regulations for diminished wild-fish runs and population growth all are placing more demands on the Yakima River.

“There was not enough storage built originally for the demand for irrigation,” Monroe said. “You rely totally on snowpack and runoff to meet all your irrigation needs, and the storage can only hold less than half the demand.”

Meanwhile, Prigmore, who’s owned the Silver Dollar for almost 10 years, wonders what Black Rock talk will do to the value of his investment, which has a sign out front that says: “This is the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s going to stymie the sale of this property. Should this thing happen, a person buying it would be looking at a limited time for holding,” Prigmore said.

“If I was in that position, I don’t know if I would buy it.”