Stream flows from the Nooksack River are running significantly below normal, putting Whatcom County at risk of “severe drought” this summer, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
A dry, low-precipitation winter, coupled with an unexpected heat wave in May that caused record-setting snowmelt, has left the region with “dramatically reduced” water flows and not enough water to meet both instream and out-of-stream needs throughout the summer, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Instream water flows primarily support environmental health, providing enough water to protect endangered and at-risk salmon spawning in the rivers. Out-of-stream users are primarily agricultural.
A June 2 blog post from Ecology said July streamflows are projected to be low for the Nooksack watershed, as well as the Okanagan and the Entiat watersheds. As a result, “junior water rights holders in these basins are likely to be asked to restrict their diversions,” the post said.
Jimmy Norris, a communications manager in the water resources division at Ecology, said there are just nine junior water rights holders in the Nooksack watershed, and the possible restriction is not a new curtailment request.
“In the case of the Nooksack, there’s a gauge on the river, and when the gauge indicates the stream flow is below the minimum, these nine junior water rights holders know not to irrigate the next day,” Norris said Tuesday. “It’s not a curtailment. It’s just the way the water right is written.”
All nine junior water rights holders are irrigators, Norris said, and typically grow crops like hay, grass and corn, not berries or other crops that need constant watering throughout the growing season.
A water right, granted by the state, allows the holder to legally use a specific amount of water each year. In the Nooksack watershed, the state doesn’t know how many water rights exist, and Ecology is preparing to launch the adjudication process — a legal process to understand who holds what water rights in the region — later this summer.
A similar adjudication process just finished in Yakima, where the state hashed out water claims for three decades.
