State Declares Snowpack Drought

[Editor's note: Beginning this week, The Times will feature regular updates to the 2015 Drought, including interviews with water experts, farmers, ag specialists, climatologists, business owners, residents and others, to keep you informed on how the record-low snowpack this winter will impact us all in the coming months.]

WALLA WALLA – Eric Hartwig is worried about what the rivers in the Walla Walla and Touchet valleys are doing. They are drying up – and fast.

"We are setting all-time low flow records right now," he said last Thursday. "We are worse than during the Dust Bowl. If you can conserve water, please conserve."

Hartwig is the regional water master for the Washington State Department of Ecology in Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield and Asotin counties. He watches the water levels throughout the region daily.

"This is the first drought we've had to declare since 2005, and this one is worse than that," he said.

Governor Jay Inslee declared a statewide drought emergency on May 15. The declaration came after the governor's Emergency Water Executive Committee determined that 48 of 62 watersheds in Washington have water supplies of 75 percent of normal or below, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology website.

Washington has been in a snowpack drought since the governor's first drought declaration on March 13 for the Yakima and Walla Walla basins and the Dungeness basin on the Olympic Peninsula.

Snowpack is like a frozen reservoir for river basins, in a typical year accumulating over the winter and slowly melting through the spring and summer providing a water supply for rivers and streams. This year, experts project that runoff from snowmelt for the period of April through September will be the lowest on record in the past 64 years, Ecology has stated.

The lack of snowpack is already affecting local rivers. Last Thursday, the Touchet River was running at 15 cubic feet per second (cfs), according to Hartwig. The average flow for the first and second weeks of June is closer to 69 cfs, he said. Between Wednesday and Thursday of last week – just 24 hours – the river dropped 10 cfs.

"I could be looking at shutting off water rights any day now," he said. By Monday of this week, the levels on the Touchet had stabilized, at 15 cfs downstream near Cummins Road in Walla Walla. Last year during this same week, the levels recorded at that station were 90-130 cfs. Five years ago, in 2010, water flow in that same location during the first part of June was 200-300 cfs.

You can monitor river and stream flow data yourself online on the state Department of Ecology's Flow Monitoring Network at https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/wrx/wrx/flows/regions/state.asp.