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More Dogs on Main: Managing the water flow

Tom Clyde
  

Park Record columnist Tom Clyde.
Tom Clyde mug

The wet winter seems to be turning into a soggy spring. By and large, we dodged the flood bullet this year. The people managing reservoirs and water systems have done a great job adjusting to it. Nature helped with a very gradual warm up, and the snow melt, massive as it was, has mostly been smooth. 

There are spots. Willow Creek in Snyderville has been a problem all spring and isn’t really down to normal yet. Some of the smaller tributaries to the river in my area have been out of their banks and caused some minor problems. The expectation was houses and bridges floating away. That didn’t happen, which is actually amazing given the volume of snow that had to melt.

It could have been entirely different if we had experienced a week of hot weather in mid-May. It’s better to be lucky than good, and this year we were lucky enough to be both. Lucky with the things we can’t control and good at the things we can.



It’s a lot more complicated than it seems. Rivers aren’t just rivers in Utah. They are plumbing and fiefdoms. By default, I was kind of the flood watch contact person in my neighborhood. The list of agencies involved is long. Jurisdictions overlap. The water management agencies don’t always get along with each other.

The Duchesne Tunnel brings water under the Uinta mountains from the Duchesne river into the Provo. That’s managed by Provo River Water Users, a sort of semi-governmental/semi-private agency accountable to its shareholders. They operate the tunnel, the Weber-Provo canal, and Deer Creek Dam. The Central Utah Water Conservancy District manages the Jordanelle Dam and Utah Lake. 



The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a thumb on it all.

UDOT manages the bridges.

A dozen irrigation companies manage canals of various sizes that take water out of the river. That’s handy when the flooding potential is high if they can take some of the peak flow. The state engineer is involved. 

At the center of it is the river commissioner, whose normal job is to tell people to reduce their usage to administer the water rights and distribute the water to those who are entitled to it.

Somehow this year, they all got together and managed the entire system as a system. It worked extremely well, and they communicated with those of us on the front line. So hats off to the unsung people who made it work this year.

Now the only question is what to do with all those sandbags my neighbors felt obligated to stack everywhere with a kind of religious zeal. They were ready for Noah’s flood. I guess better safe than sorry.

While worrying about flooding, I was also getting the farm set up for the summer. We have a couple of center pivot irrigation systems. They are impressive pieces of engineering, though at their heart, they are Rube Goldberg machines. Mine take water out of an open canal. The Potts brothers hand dug two miles of it in the 1880s. It clings to the contour of the mountainside and is a pain to maintain now with modern machinery. It’s hard to imagine digging and maintaining it with draft horses and scrapers. The “soil” is mostly boulders. After two brutally hard years digging the ditch, they raised their first crop. Then they did the only reasonable thing. They packed up and joined the Alaska gold rush.

I think of them every year when I turn the water into the ditch, and wonder about their decision.

The pivot system is complicated to set up. Filling the pipes is a process so you don’t blast a 12-inch column of water against a closed valve and blow it all out of the ground. There are drain plugs everywhere. I have a peanut butter jar full of them. In the fall, when I take them out, they all go in the jar.  In the spring they go back into the pumps and controls. If everything goes well, the number of drain holes and the number of plugs will match. If there are plugs left over, I’ve missed something and it’s hard to know where. 

So with one plug still in the jar, I turned the water on to see where the unexpected geyser showed up. The system is an exciting mix of water and 480 volts of electricity. The technician who rescues me now and then isn’t the least bit reluctant to stand in a puddle and poke a screwdriver into the electrical panel. I prefer to have the power disconnected at the meter, the panel, the control box and several other interim places. If I could get Rocky Mountain Power to shut down the entire grid before poking around in there, I would. But it all went together and is operating smoothly. The Potts brothers would never have imagined anything like that, though I suspect that the Alaska gold rush still had more potential than farming at this altitude.

So there it is, summer’s on. The pivots are turning, and this week, the chokecherries are in blossom. The sandhill cranes, Canada geese, meadowlarks and redwing blackbirds provide an amazing soundtrack for it all, with the boulders crashing in the river adding some percussion. 

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