[env-trinity] Trinity Journal: Trinity County preps for water woes

[Tom Stokely]

http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/environment/article_0743f74a-af07-11e3-b610-001a4bcf6878.html 

 
County preps for water woes
By Sally Morris The Trinity Journal | Posted: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 6:15 am
Despite some relief from recent rainfall totals in Trinity County, local weather watchers, water districts and the county’s office of emergency services are monitoring and preparing for potential drought-induced water shortages, competition and conflict among water users and extreme fire danger.
Asking for a status report on local drought preparedness, the Trinity County Board of Supervisors last week first heard the results of a local climate assessment initiated in 2009 by the Five Counties Salmonid Conservation Program to chart and compare precipitation trends over the past 120 years of recorded measurement.
Program Director Mark Lancaster concluded that Trinity County’s weather patterns saw small fluctuations over the first hundred years, punctuated by a few very wet or very dry years, but in the past 33 years, the extremes have become more frequent.
“The way our weather runs has changed dramatically. We see a swing of extremes with few average years in between. For a water planner that is very difficult when you need the water all the time,” he said, adding that catastrophic fires also tend to coincide with the extremely dry years.
He said in the past 33 years, there were nine periods that were either very wet or very dry and six of those periods occurred in the past 15 years alone “so even in the last 15 years the pattern of extremes seems to have accelerated along with acceleration of stand-replacing, catastrophic fires.”
Lancaster reported that although precipitation in February and March were about average, the total for the water year beginning last October is only about 40 percent of average, making it one of the driest on record, “and before you say we’re getting better, remember there is no snowpack. If we’re going to have this climatic fluctuation, the solutions have to be local.”
He cited a number of water saving remedies that can be installed or promoted, including one of the most important which is to detect and repair any leaks, but also gray water reclamation systems and rooftop rain water capture systems that property owners and industries may consider. Four have been installed as demonstration projects in Weaverville alone.
The Five Counties Program was formed in 1997 to proactively address conditions that resulted in a federal listing of coho salmon as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act and work collaboratively across political boundaries to head off the potential of a more restrictive endangered listing.
Early priorities were projects across the five county region of Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Siskiyou and Trinity to remove salmon migration barriers from streams, then water quality improvement and training programs.
After completing a $600,000 grant-funded salmon habitat improvement project on private property in 2007, the stream above the work dried up “so we started focusing on water quantity as well,” Lancaster said.
In Trinity County, the 2009 study concluded that 56 percent of residents get their water from community service districts, primarily in Weaverville and Hayfork. The rest rely on surface water diversions and a few wells, creating a lot of competition for groundwater.
Lancaster related his experience in 1987 of standing in a Weaverville Basin creek one day during that very hot summer and seeing the creek completely dry up in the space of just 20 minutes. He later attributed it to the impact of several users pumping water out of the creek all at the same time.
“Thousands and thousands of fish died. I tried to save some by moving them into pools, but gave up and ran to get my camera instead. I believe it happens a lot and the chances of actually being there to see it are just very rare,” he said.
The past five to 10 years have seen a large increase in water diverters, Lancaster said, placing Weaver Creek, and to a lesser degree Hayfork Creek and the Lewiston area at risk of failing to provide reliable community water supply.
“I don’t want to vilify the whole group, but suddenly there are a lot of pot growers in the system and the way they remove water and conduct operations makes them hard to contact or talk to about setting up standards,” he said.
“Why do we care? Because landowners, especially timberland owners, are being heavily regulated under the Endangered Species Act and if the coho listing goes from threatened to endangered, the options at the local level become much more difficult, so we have incentive to work on this and not let the fish die,” Lancaster said, adding that “pumping water illegally from creeks, killing fish, is going to be very detrimental to everybody.”
From another perspective, the Weaverville Community Services District General Manager Wes Scribner said the district doesn’t know what its fate will be this summer, “and we have to play it by ear, but we are preparing a contingency plan that begins with voluntary conservation triggered by whenever we do start pulling water from the (Trinity) river.”
In an average year, the district draws about 30 percent of its supply from the river in the summer and the rest from Weaver Creek. If 100 percent of the supply has to be pumped from the river, it creates a serious financial impact on the district, at which point an emergency drought surcharge could be imposed on district customers and that contingency is being prepared for in the event it is needed.
“But for now it is business as usual. If we get everyone conserving right now, we lose revenue and I don’t have a big reservoir to store the water in, so it’s a fine line,” Scribner said.
While the Ewing Reservoir that serves the Hayfork Waterworks District #1 is reportedly full with an estimated three-year supply, both water districts are concerned about theft of water.
Scribner said it’s an issue every year, and when people open a hydrant to steal water and slam it shut, there’s a massive pressure surge “that can be catastrophic, touching miles and miles of system and costing thousands of dollars to repair, placing the whole system in jeopardy. We have hundreds of hydrants and it’s hard to put cameras on all of them so I want all of our customers to be aware and if they see something suspicious, call us.”
People whose wells and storage tanks run dry can pay to fill up at district facilities installed for that purpose to avoid theft and system damage.
From the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services, Deputy Director Eric Palmer said he is not aware of any actual agricultural losses in the county at this time so there is no benefit to be gained from declaring a local state of emergency right now, but the office is monitoring the drought situation.
Regarding fire threat, he said “we’d be foolish not to anticipate a bad fire season every fire season. After 40 years of living in Trinity County, I’ve learned you can’t predict arson or lightning and if it’s going to happen, we have to be prepared for the worst and hope for the best. If 2008 hits us again, we are prepared.”
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