Water flowing again after massive blowout

Water is once more flowing to farms and ranches near Charlo following a washout that dried up ditches for three weeks and cut off irrigators during the middle of an otherwise productive year for crops.

On June 14, a portion of the concrete lining the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project’s C Canal gave out, forcing project operators to halt the flow from the Ninepipes Reservoir and resulting in the worst water shortage some local growers had ever experienced.

“Some people have said upwards of 10,000 acres were affected,” said Danny Krantz, a lifelong resident of the Mission Valley and the manager of Open 8 Genetics in Charlo. “We run about 2,500 acres — for the most part alfalfa, a little bit of corn and the rest is pasture — and this affected about 1,350 irrigated acres of it.”

While farmers in the area are no strangers to the aging infrastructure throughout the state’s largest irrigation project, Crantz said he had never seen such an extensive disruption in water deliveries. Coming on the heels of last year’s record-breaking drought, this rainy start to the 2016 growing season had been a welcome relief, but he said his farm was forced to harvest just a fraction of his expected yield on the alfalfa crop’s second cutting.

“It was shaping up to be a really nice year. The reservoir was full and that was huge for us,” he said. “It looked like we were going to be able to irrigate all year long without any concerns or any questions about volume of water.”

Construction crews from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the agency that oversees management and operations of the irrigation project, finished repairs on the canal last week. Project manager Peter Plant stated in updates emailed to irrigators that the scope of work included removing sediment, reshaping the canal, removing the existing structure and constructing a new one.

The first trickle of water began flowing into the canal on July 7, and Flathead Irrigation District Chairman Dick Erb said about three quarters of the impacted landowners had been able to irrigate their fields by Monday.

“It was good in a sense that irrigators were talking about how they could rotate or share the water when it becomes available, because it can take time for a ditch that’s been dry many weeks to fill up,” Erb said.

He said he has yet to tally up the number of irrigators and acres in his district that were affected by the washout, but noted the weekend’s heavy rainfall could have hardly come at a better time.

“We got blessed in a way with an inch, inch and a half of rain over the weekend. It’s July, and I’ve lived here now about 17 years and I don’t recall a rainfall in July or in August like that.”

Susan Lake, who operates Lake Farms, Inc. in Ronan, said that while she wasn’t affected by the washout, several irrigators using the C Canal remarked at Monday’s water district meeting that deliveries seemed to have improved overall.

“What was said in the meeting today was the irrigators were getting their water even faster than they had been,” Lake said.

Erb’s own farm in Moiese was spared the impacts of the C Canal washout, but he said a similar disruption to the canal serving his hayfields cut off irrigation for a three-week period two years ago.

The cost of emergency repairs are paid through the district’s operation and maintenance fees, which cost irrigators $26 per acre each year. But Erb said the revenue from those fees falls short of the funding that would be needed to tackle the irrigation project’s lengthy deferred maintenance list.

The most recent study of outstanding maintenance priorities for the project was prepared by California Polytechnic State University for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Published in April, it estimated the total cost of modernization at $188.8 million, although that figure also includes non-maintenance costs such as expanding road access to irrigation infrastructure.

“I think anybody familiar with the project will be able to give you a list of three or four spots in the project that are high-risk spots, and you never know when one of them will blow,” Erb said. “Until we get a major rehabilitation for the project, it’s hard to predict where they will occur.”

Without that overhaul of deferred maintenance, Erb expects those types of periodic outages will persist, while costs continue to rise.

“There are significant leaks here in our canal, and we all worry that someday we’ll wake up and have no water because the ditch is blown out.”