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Last Updated on Wednesday, 24 August 2011 16:34

Written by Christy Martinez

“I always look forward to August,” says Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec) Wyoming Area Manager John Lawson as 2011’s record inflows into the state’s river systems begin to come to an end.
“We’re in the throes of reducing our releases above Pathfinder Reservoir, and we’re also attempting to reduce releases below Pathfinder, because inflows have dropped off to the extent that we’re comfortable reducing,” says Lawson.
Pathfinder’s level was beginning to come down in late July, and Lawson says he expects its spill to cease by July 31.
“We’re lowering the reservoir’s level, and it’ll be the longest we’ve ever spilled,” says Lawson. “We started spilling in May, and spilled through the entire months of June and July.”
The Pathfinder spill in 2010 stopped by mid-July.
“Compared to what we were getting, today’s inflows aren’t significant, but we’re still getting a considerable amount,” notes Lawson. “Today’s inflows are a lot higher than we’d normally expect, and they’re still coming at a pretty good rate.”
Natural Resources Conservation Service Water Supply Specialist Lee Hackleman says that he continued the Monday Morning Snow Reports several weeks longer than usual, just to show people the changes in snow water equivalent, or SWE.
As of late July, Hackleman says all the NRCS SNOTEL sites are melted out.         “Grand Targhee melted out over the weekend of July 23, and that was the last one to go, but there’s still considerable snow above those sites, and some of that probably won’t melt out this year,” he says, adding that some of the glacier areas might build this year.
“We were projecting some 300-percent runoffs in some places, and I’m not sure if we’ll end up getting that or not,” says Hackleman. “Time will tell, but we’re definitely getting 200-plus in a lot of places.”
Of navigating the challenging situation indicated by Hackleman’s office beginning in February, Lawson says his office managed through it very well, and Glendo Reservoir, in the North Platte River’s lower reach, didn’t reach the levels anticipated by BuRec.
“This year Glendo was about four feet lower than last year, and a lot of that is attributed to two things – we didn’t get the inflow in the lower reach that we were afraid we might, and actions taken by the Wheatland Irrigation District early on made room in their reservoirs for Laramie River runoff, which allowed us to continue to release higher flows out of Glendo during June than we did last year,” explains Lawson. “We benefitted on both ends.”
Lawson says last year’s inflows between Pathfinder and Glendo were 300,000 acre-feet, while this year they were in the neighborhood of 190,000 acre-feet.
Of the happy ending to record snowpack in the region and its flooding potential, Lawson says the early decisions made by BuRec paid off, and weather conditions also helped.
“We had record inflow into Seminoe Reservoir – we forecast 1,950,000 acre-feet, and it looks like we’ll have over 1,970,000 acre-feet this year,” says Lawson, noting the previous record was 1,550,000 acre-feet. “We exceeded the record from 1983/1984 by over 400,000 acre-feet.”
“We really didn’t have as high of a peak flow as last year, but we had a lot more,” he adds. “By coming out slower, that gave us more time to keep evacuating, so we were helped there. We had good decisions made by Reclamation, and Mother Nature did cooperate, considering what she was trying to do to us.”
“We’re feeling pretty good about it, particularly for all those people who could have been affected,” he notes.
Of the other major reservoirs in the state, Lawson says Buffalo Bill in Park County also exceeded all inflow records.
“We’re anticipating we’ll probably have an inflow around 1,240,000 acre-feet, which far exceeds anything in our recent history,” says Lawson. “We managed to get through that without any flooding downstream on the Shoshone River.”
Lawson says avoiding the flooding was a result of keeping Buffalo Bill and Boysen reservoirs at levels the public though were too extremely low early on.
“We got input from people implying we were mis-operating and would never fill those reservoirs. Fortunately they were down, because we needed every bit of space,” says Lawson. “We got up to releases of 8,400 cubic feet per second out of Buffalo Bill, and that’s the highest release we’ve made since modification in 1994.”
Lawson says Boysen was in the flood control pool, but levels are now starting to subside.
“We’re now on the downside, and we’re reducing releases out of both Boysen and Buffalo Bill, and we anticipate getting out of the flood control pool at Boysen no later than the second week of August,” he explains. “Things turned out rather well, considering the kind of inflows and snowpack we had.”
Planning for the 2011 inflows began in Fall 2010, after the agency was surprised by record inflows the previous spring.
“We went into this year with far better planning for something like this, and last year we made the decision to reduce our total storage in the North Platte system down to two million acre-feet, and that required us to evacuate water toward the end of the water year in September,” explains Lawson. He says his office will take the same approach this fall. “We’re targeting two million acre-feet again as the ending amount, and we’re on track for that.”
Beginning in February again, BuRec will start to watch and evaluate the snowpack conditions very closely to decide how soon to begin to release water from the system, much like they did earlier this year.
Of whether or not the last two springs indicate any sort of a trend, Lawson says he doesn’t know that anybody is willing to step off that cliff and make a prediction.
Christy Martinez is managing editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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Last Updated on Saturday, 29 October 2011 01:00

Written by Christy Martinez

Casper – Out of the last 100 years of data, in 2011 the North Platte River system received the highest inflows in recorded history, just four years after the lowest recorded inflows in 2007.

The seven dams on the North Platte River system, which is managed by the Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec), hold 2.8 million acre-feet of water, with another 280,000 acre-feet available in Glendo Reservoir’s flood control space.

Of managing a system that large, especially after the 2010 and 2011 water years, BuRec Wyoming Area Manager John Lawson said he and his staff have to be prepared for anything that might come at them. Lawson spoke at the annual Wyoming Water Association meeting in Casper Oct. 26.

Speaking of the sheer amount of snow near Centennial on Highway 130 on May 16, Lawson said, “We’d never seen snow like that before, and especially not when we were approaching the first of June. That isn’t the time to start saying we should have let more water out of the reservoirs in March.”

As it was, BuRec started taking snowpack into account in late February.

“Usually the snowpack then doesn’t mean a whole lot, but last winter we paid attention,” said Lawson.

When spring runoff ended, 2011 beat out the other years of record inflow, 1983 and 1984, which had 1,500,000 acre-feet inflows, by 400,000 acre-feet at 1,970,000 acre-feet of inflow into Seminoe Reservoir.

“The scary thing for us was 2010, but it was great we had it, because it was a wake-up call,” said Lawson. “We probably wouldn’t have made the 2011 decisions if not for 2010, which produced 1,241,000 acre-feet of inflow, when the 30-year average is 714,000 acre-feet. We really got surprised, and as a result we started evacuating our operations in late irrigation season 2010, and taking action for this year.”

Early last summer, Lawson said that come June 1 he and his staff were scratching their heads because of a snowpack nobody had ever seen.

“There were no models available for that kind of snowpack on June 1,” he said.  “The best thing we could do was take experience and history and do the best we could with a projection, and we came up with 1,969,000 acre-feet of potential water as inflow into Seminoe.”

BuRec estimated the flow they thought would come into the system for every day through Sept. 30, and then projected how they’d get rid of the water.
However, come June 1 the system had only received less than 600,000 acre-feet of that prediction.

“We were sitting on a projection that said we’d get 1,400,000 acre-feet of water coming into Seminoe in two months, while the four-month average is only 700,000 acre-feet,” said Lawson. “We started scratching our head on where we were going to put it, and how to move it down through the system.”

When the runoff started to come out, Lawson said Pathfinder Dam spilled for two-and-a-half months, from May 15 through July 31.

“The previous record was a little over a month. A lot of water was pushed out of the system,” he noted. “We were releasing just over 8,300 cubic feet per second (cfs) from Pathfinder, and that doesn’t mean much, unless you live in Casper.”

While Pathfinder was spilling at that rate, at one point over 17,000 cfs was coming into Seminoe.

“For 30 days, the entire month of June, we had over 10,000 cfs coming into Seminoe,” he commented. “If we didn’t have the dams there, and we hadn’t found the space, the first affect would have been in Casper, then all the way on downstream. Luckily we didn’t have to go much more than the 8,300 cfs through Casper.”

Lawson said that Mother Nature was kind this year.

“In 2010, with all that water, June was also one of the highest precipitation months on record. If we had had a June 2010 with a snowpack 2011, all the way down the stream we would have looked at a different situation,” he stated.

Of preparation for the 2010 inflows, Lawson said the fact that the system ended with only 700,000 acre-feet in the entire system in 2007, and that in 2008 Pathfinder Reservoir would have been a flow-through river had the drought continued, area irrigators were uncomfortable with the high releases.

“We had considerable debate in Scottsbluff over the subject, and we went ahead and released, but we were put on notice what would happen if injury came about,” said Lawson.

Of the previous high water years in 1907 and 1917, Lawson said, “When I came here 22 years ago and was given the graph, I said I wanted to get out before seeing those years again, but I missed it by a year.”

“The record lowest inflow in 100 years was in 2002, when Seminoe only received 118,000 acre-feet. This year it got 1,970,000 acre-feet, a factor of about 20. If you’re wondering what will come next year, don’t ask me,” he said.

Right now BuRec is preparing to draw the reservoirs down again before spring.

“We’ll move water starting in March again, and probably even if the snowpack is average or even a little below average, because it’s too unpredictable to have too much water in the system. If the snowpack doesn’t generate in late April, we can start adjusting and cutting it back, but if we wait and the snowpack shoots up in late April and May, we can’t stand here and say we wished we’d released more water in March,” said Lawson.

Christy Martinez is managing editor of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 July 2010 10:35

Written by Christy Hemken

People and pelicans alike flocked to Pathfinder Dam in mid-June to view water running over the spillway and into Fremont Canyon – an event not seen since 1984.
More water flowed into Seminoe Reservoir in the first 15 days of June than ever before, and releases from Gray Reef Reservoir on June 16 reached 6,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). According to the Bureau of Reclamation, river flows into the North Platte River are normally 2,000 to 2,600 cfs this time of year.
Wyoming’s North Platte reservoir system, which holds 2.8 million cubic feet of water, has filled to capacity this spring.
The Upper North Platte River drainage in southern Wyoming and the Sweetwater drainage from the southeast side of the Wind River Range have provided much of the water. Remaining snowpack levels in those areas combined with early June rainstorms and warm temperatures created high runoff.
“Last week it was beyond frightening,” says Popo Agie Conservation District Executive Director Jeri Trebelcock of the days before the severe floods began in Fremont County. “They were talking about snowfall of Biblical proportions, and it was hard for anyone to wrap their arms around.”
Ron Cunningham of the Fremont County Cooperative Extension Service says most livestock has been moved to summer range and hasn’t been involved in the flooding, but he says crop production is the biggest concern in the area, as the cool, wet temperatures have stunted growth.
“There have been some real challenges in the area, and some operators have lost bridges that will affect how they get to their places, and there’s discussion of temporary bridges from the Army Corps of Engineers, and that would help,” says Cunningham.
He says nobody thought flooding would start so early with 70-degree temperatures, “But the snow we got in May had not set up like winter snow, so it started to come off at a lot lower temperatures,” he says.
Cunningham says 140 Fremont County homes have been flooded or are at high risk of flooding, and that more moisture is forecasted.
As a part of the recovery effort and water quality monitoring, the Popo Agie Conservation District has coordinated a countywide rural well water testing program.
“We’re concerned about wells being inundated with the flood, and not only overland flows but also compromised septic systems,” says Trebelcock.
Drop off sites will be set up June 21 through 25. “Folks can come to the Conservation District offices to pick up a kit to take home and collect well water,” explains Trebelcock.
The locations include the Popo Agie Conservation District in Lander, the Crowheat Conservation District in Dubois, the Lower Wind River Conservation District in Riverton and the Wind River Environmental Quality Commission on the Reservation at Building 10, Washakie Street in Fort Washakie.
“Folks need to collect their samples and have them back to any one of the sites by noon June 21 through 25,” says Trebelcock. “They will be taken to the lab in Riverton for analysis, and the results will be mailed directly to the landowner.”
The tests detect the presence or absence of total coliform bacteria, and if it’s found to be present a second test will be run for E. coli.
“It’s a countywide effort, and the Office of Homeland Security will pay for it. It’s a free test,” she notes.
In addition to the integrity of rural wells in the county, Trebelcock says a major concern from the flooding is ag infrastructure, including irrigation systems.
“Here on the Popo Agie we had the Cemetary Headwall – a major lateral in Lander – fail, and not only did it fail, but it provided the opportunity for the middle fork of the Popo Agie to go through that headwall,” she says.
The conservation district is working through the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to implement Emergency Watershed Protection, or EWP.
“With that partnership we’ve had engineers on the ground helping people,” says Trebelcock. “We have four EWP contracts currently. One is for the Cemetery Headwall, plus we’ve shored up two properties to keep those homes from going down the river and another project is immediately above a trailer court to keep the trailers in place.”
“It’s been an amazing program, and it’s given the opportunity for funding and to have the engineers on the ground telling folks what to do,” she adds.
“We know it will be crunch time when the water recedes,” says Trebelcock. “We have headgates high and dry, and other headgates where the channel has left them, and other headgates have toppled over. Fields have had overland flows, and we’ve got fences down and private bridges are out. We’re trying to keep that ag infrastructure in the forefront as we talk to people with homeland security, and the county commissioners are already aware of what’s happened.”
“We’re trying to keep folks in the loop, so they know it’s not just a town problem, but a countywide problem and it will affect ag folks,” she says. “We’re looking for programs and funding to help the ag community put these things back together.”
So far Trebelcock says the Wyoming Association of Conservation Districts has toured the area, as well as Wyoming NRCS Director Xavier Montoya and Wyoming Department of Agriculture Director Jason Fearneyhough.
“We have a lot of ears, we just hope they can help us put this back together,” says Trebelcock.
Moving forward, Trebelcock says the Conservation District will look for funding opportunities everywhere to build the biggest pot of recovery money that they can.

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Last Updated on Friday, 25 April 2008 07:05

Written by Christy Hemken