No, we're not talking about the "underground economy" or something similar, but really going underground, all in the name of saving water, and perhaps, bringing back the salmon.
Kate Ramsayer wrote in the 25 March 2008 edition of the Bend Bulletin that irrigation districts in Central Oregon are replacing their open canals with pipe to save water.
Ramsayer describes the project currently underway in the Swalley Irrigation District (SID), which is costing $11 million, funded by private and public groups and the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (OWEB).
She writes:
The district decided to pipe the five miles through Bend because a consultant identified that as the area where most of the water was seeping out.
“That was where the worst water losses were,” said Jan Lee, the district’s general manager. “When subdivisions were built, they do blasting, and the basalt geology gets fractured even more.”
Piping those miles will save the district about a quarter of the water it diverts from the Deschutes, meaning better water quality and habitat for fish, Lee said.
Swalley would like to pipe most of its network of canals. But, according to Tod Heisler, executive director of the Deschutes River Conservancy (DRC), only about 20 percent of the region’s canal system would have to be piped to provide the water savings that biologists say is needed to create a healthy environment for fish and other aquatic wildlife.
What Lee says about the geology is true. The relatively young basalts on the eastern side of the Cascades Range are generally quite permeable, so unlined canals leak like sieves. I've heard some claim a canal can lose as much as 50% of its flow to leakage.
But that leakage likely becomes ground water recharge and can support a riparian ecotone along the canal that also serves as wildlife habitat. And people also like to see flowing surface water. The aforementioned are some of the reasons people don't want to pipe the water.
I remember speaking with one irrigation district manager in the Bend area a few years ago. He had just convinced his disctrict's board and its patrons to undertake costly piping that would ultimately pipe all the canal flow. Some of the old-timers fought him - they simply wanted to see the water flowing in the ditches and weren't concerned with restoring the aquatic ecosystem and bringing the salmon back to the headwaters streams from which their water came.
In fact, the manager told me an interesting story. When he first took the job in the late 1980s, one of the senior irrigators took him around to show him the ditch system. When they got to the stream that supplied the irrigation water, the old guy pointed at the stream and sternly warned, "If that stream still has water in it come August, then you ain't done your job." Almost 20 years later, we stood on the banks of that same stream in August, and there were a few cfs (cubic feet per second) in the channel. The manager told me that they expected to see salmon here in a few years.
I asked him how he convinced the district's board and patrons to spend the money to pipe the water. He said, "I told them we could fight this [the environmental flow requirements for the salmon] in court, which might take a few million dollars and years of litigation, after which we'd almost certainly lose. Or, we can go ahead now and do the right thing. So it's your call." They decided, some of them grudgingly, to forego the legal fight and just do it. He then told me of his oldest patron, a 78-year-old rancher, who gets out there and moves pipe and welds it and puts the younger guys to shame.
"I'd rather be upstream with a shovel and a ditch than downstream with a decree." -- Western USA water saying
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