“This year was really a strange year because it started out dry and cold so there was no runoff, so we had to start our pumps up right at the first,” said Settlement Canyon Irrigation Company President Gary Bevan. “When the runoff finally came, then it was all right for a couple of weeks, but the water’s quit running down out of the creek. We’re pumping our wells again and still can’t keep up.”
The weekend restrictions consist of no watering from Friday at 7 p.m. until Monday at 7 a.m.
Bevan said Settlement Canyon Reservoir is currently at 49.9 feet, which is 3 feet less than four days ago.
“We can’t continue to lose 6 and 7 inches of water a day,” he said. “It’s dropping fast. There hasn’t been any rain and it’s just been hot and people have been putting a lot of water on their lawns.”
He added although the reservoir is a couple feet higher than last year, it’s because everything’s two to three weeks behind this year.
Bevan said he encourages people to cut back on their water use to help the situation and to remember to turn off their sprinklers when it’s raining.
“What they use now they won’t have in August and September,” he said.
On the west side of the valley, Grantsville Reservoir, as of July 5, was 10 feet from running over. At its highest point, the reservoir was 6 feet from spilling over.
“It’s [the reservoir] not doing bad,” said Grantsville Irrigation Company Watermaster Lynn Taylor. “It’s a little higher than last year, but the streams are extremely low and it’s going down like there’s a great big hole in the bottom of it, which there is — there’s a lot of people watering.”
In regards to precipitation, Taylor said despite the snowpack not being too bad, there hasn’t been much precipitation since the first of the year.
“It started dwindling after the first of the year and kept going down,” he said.
He added reservoir levels aren’t going to come up anymore this summer.
“It’s really going down and there for a few days it was dropping a foot a day,” he said.
According to Brian McInerney, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City, the overall water situation in northern Utah is favorable. He said a seven-week period of unrelenting storms over the winter followed by a cool spring helped delay rapid snowmelt. He said most reservoirs across the state are fuller than average this time of year.
“That recharged the groundwater and we had a cool enough spring and early summer that we continued to add water up through July 1,” he said. “All in all, the water picture is looking very good.”
swest@tooeletranscript.com
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