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22 ....' HYDROLOGIC AND HUMAN ASPECTS OF THE 1976-77 DROUGHT droughts and floods, will take time and will require statesmanship by all concerned. Legal Aspects Many proposed actions to alleviate the drought ran into legal or quasi-legal road- blocks. New laws, legal and administrative decisions, or temporary agreements between the parties or entities involved had to be made within short time frames to allow some of the proposals to be implemented. Other proposed actions could not be accomplished, but they are the bases for study and possible new legislation" agreements, or decisions in the near future. A few brief descriptions of the legal aspects of drought related problems follow. Water users made suggestions to operating agencies about what the agencies should do or should not have done. In one case, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was criticized for releasing too much water from Shasta Lake, Calif., in 1976. The inter-agency agreement for operations at Shasta Dam requires the inflow for the year to drop below 3.2 million acre-ft before steps can be taken to curtail water deliveries. But inflow was 3.7 million acre-ft; therefore, water was released to gen- erate electricity, to supply some water for irrigation, to meet pUblic health standards, and to help control salinity in the Delta. In the San Joaquin Valley, Calif., a rancher proposed to pump water into the Delta- Mendota Canal and take delivery of his water farther down the canal. This was physically possible, but the proposal was turned down be- cause the mixed water might not meet water- quality standards at the outlet of the canal. In Iowa, two counties challenged the right of the Iowa Natural Resources Council to issue permits for irrigation wells to farmers. Tem- porary injunctions were obtained to halt the practice on the grounds that public water for private profit is subject to provisions of the Federal Environmental Protection Act; there- fore, an environmental impact statement is required for each permit. The counties also contended that the Council ignored the poten- tial for pollution from irrigation of fields that have been treated with chemical fertilizers and weed and insect killers. The problem was intensified because the drought had increased the normal 45 applications per year for per- mits to more than 500 in 1976 for all of Iowa. Though technically not a legal action, the Corps of Engineers could not unilaterally reduce releases from two reservoirs in Iowa below minimum releases agreed upon by the Corps and the water users until all parties agreed to new minimum releases at two-thirds of the existing discharge for the duration of the drought. See page 30. The flow of the North Platte River near Casper, Wyo., was the third lowest on record in July 1977 and dropped almost to the flow that would have called for a reduction of the amount diverted to the city of Casper unless some arrangement could be made with several oil companies and many agricultural users that have water rights senior to the right held by the city of Casper. There is no Wyoming law that stipulated that humans have a first right to water. Only the natural flow of the North Platte River is available for domestic use, and that released from storage developed for agri- culture and other uses is not. In the Shoshone River basin in northwestern Wyoming, water deliveries to an irrigation district were shut off for 2 days in May 1977 due to drought conditions because higher prior- ity (earlier than 1905) rights had to be pro- tected. State water law in Nebraska does not limit the amount of ground water that can be pumped, but the reasonable use doctrine speci- fies that it is to be used on the overlying lands. This imposes a constraint on the conjunctive use of surface water and ground water because ground water cannot be pumped into a canal for distribution on "non-overlying" lands. Nebraska law and law in many other States do not recognize the interconnection between surface-water and ground-water sources; there- fore, the increased pumping--clrought or no drought-has depleted the streamflow in sev- eral areas. This has jeopardized the senior water rights, some dating back to 1890, of irri- gators using surface supplies and their ability to repay their share of the Federal invest- ments for irrigation projects. One example is the Frenchman Creek- Enders Reservoir area about 50 mi west of McCook, Nebr. See figure 14. Almost the entire flow of Frenchman Creek is ground- water discharge, and the average annual flow at the Imperial gage just upstream from