A Dry Washington State Is Awash in Reservoir Proposals

The year was 1929. The tall sagebrush at the far end of central Washington’s Moses Coulee hinted at a generous water supply and good soil, despite the arid habitat, so the Billingsley family settled in.

It hasn’t always been easy raising cattle in the stark environment, but the one thing the Billingsleys haven’t had to worry about all those years is water. They’ve had plenty to get by.

Water could pose a different threat if Moses Coulee becomes the site of a reservoir to store Columbia River water for dry years. A new study for the state and federal governments narrowed a list of potential reservoir sites to 11, including a 20-mile-long reservoir that would flood the tiny post office, elementary school and farm families that make up Palisades.

Dave Billingsley, whose 4,500 acres or so sit at the base of a cliff where Palisades Road climbs out of Moses Coulee, isn’t sweating yet. He’s heard the proposal -- and others like it -- before.

“With all of the current environmental concerns, I have a hard time thinking you could get a project like that through,” Billingsley said with a wry smile.

Proposals for storing Columbia River water have been floated for years, but perhaps never more so than after last summer, when farmers, fish and cities alike suffered under a severe drought. Snowpack in the mountains was far below normal, and forecasters have predicted the potential for it to continue declining in the decades to come.

Many believe additional storage in the region is the answer. Irrigators in the Yakima Valley threw renewed support behind the proposed Black Rock Reservoir, which would store as much as 1.3 million acre-feet of water, drawn from the Columbia River, behind a 760-foot-tall dam.

An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land a foot deep.

The reservoir, estimated to cost as much as $4 billion, would deliver water to irrigators in the lower Yakima Valley and leave more water in the Yakima River for fish. But it would do little to ease water woes in the larger Columbia basin.

Communities up and down the Columbia River have been seeking additional water to meet their growth needs, despite a moratorium on new water rights imposed by the state Department of Ecology.

Irrigators and municipalities alike face having their water shut off or slowed during dry years to ensure a full supply for those with more senior water rights.

Also, farmers who draw water from the declining Odessa aquifer, which serves about 200,000 acres in eastern Washington east of the Columbia River, are finding their wells have gone dry, with water becoming even harder to find underground.

The proposals for new storage aim to alleviate those problems, as well as improve conditions for fish and power, by adding water for in-stream flows during dry periods, said Derek Sandison, central region director for the state Department of Ecology.

“This is not a speculative venture to develop more water for new growth down the road. This study is really about looking at ways to ease pain in the Columbia basin,” Sandison said.

“Since the days of Grand Coulee and Banks Lake, we haven’t looked at large-scale reservoir projects in the Columbia basin, and it’s a situation where the needs are there now to warrant a second look at some of these proposals,” he said.

The latest report, released in December, reviewed 20 previous proposals for reservoir storage. The report then narrowed the list to the 11 sites, which warranted further review based on several criteria: Each would be 10 miles or less from the Columbia River, would hold a minimum 300,000 acre-feet of water and would require a pumping lift of 800 feet or less.

The proposals range greatly in size -- from about 330,000 acre-feet at Alder Creek below McNary Dam on the lower Columbia in Klickitat County, to the largest proposal, Moses Coulee, at 4.2 million acre-feet.

The impacts also vary widely. Homes or communities could be flooded, as well as roads, power lines, American Indian cultural resources, wetlands or prime habitat for threatened or endangered species.

Ecology officials hope to narrow the list further to three or four proposals for additional study later this year, Sandison said, eliminating those that might have fatal flaws.

Three proposals on the lower Columbia might not make sense because they are so far downstream and would not ease the problems the reservoir is intended to address. Others might be eliminated because they are too small.

Ecology officials have identified water needs at about 1 million acre-feet.

“There’s clearly some interesting potential sites that have been identified, that should be looked into with more detail,” Sandison said. “Certainly, the ones where you have a big hit to the built-in environment, or a big hit to the natural environment, then that’s going to weigh against further evaluation of those sites.”

The cost of large reservoirs and their environmental impacts raise serious questions about the viability of any new major storage projects in the basin, said Rob Masonis of the conservation group American Rivers. Instead, he said, people should focus on getting more out of the existing water supply, through such means as conservation efforts or market-based programs.

“If we’re going to have more supply available both for in-stream and out-of-stream uses, it’s going to require those tools,” Masonis said. “It’s not going to be massive new storage projects.”

Billingsley views the Moses Coulee proposal as laden with flaws. Although his ranch sits in a “unique spot” where the water levels stay the same no matter how much he draws up his wells, other farmers closer to the Columbia River have had problems with declining water levels, he said.

“It’s an obvious site; there’s just a lot of problems involved with it. The upper part of the coulee doesn’t hold water, just hits a hole and goes down in some places to the aquifer,” he said.

At the same time, he recognizes the need to alleviate water concerns for other farmers in the coulee -- one reason he has worked with other watershed users to find ways to rejuvenate their own aquifer. One proposal would draw water from areas that flood each spring to be injected back underground in dry spots.

“We haven’t had any problems up here, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t,” he said. “I certainly understand any farmer’s concerns about water. I just think there’s a lot of things that can be done to utilize the water we have without additional storage like this.”