14d (2) - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

submit its proposed alternative(s). Other items discussed include the 2008 McPhee Reservoir spill, which resulted in over 10,000 AF of additional water for the fish pool. The CDOW will issue a report on the results of the early spring releases for native fish spawning purposes by the end of 2008. The Dolores Water Conservancy District reported that releases from the McPhee Reservoir fish pool will be maintained at a rate of 120 cfs through the end of July at the request of the CDOW. The next DRD Technical Committee meeting will be held on August 19, 2008. (Linda Bassi) ~YAMPA/WHITE RIVER BASINS REGULATIONS FLOWING TOWARD PAMPA RIVER -The Yampa River is one of the last places in the parched American West where you can take as much water as you like. But not for long. Even as the river flows rich and languid down from the Flat Tops Wilderness, the era of unimaginable plenty in this region is coming to an end. The Yampa is one of eight major river basins in Colorado that form a massive high-altitude headwaters, helping supply 19 other states, Mexico, and millions of people. Pressure from the Front Range, legal obligations to provide water for endangered fish, and even the basin's own growth have induced the state to step firmly in. The river must be harnessed, its diversion structures mapped, its users monitored. Until now, gentlemen's agreements among the region's ranchers, coal companies and small towns have kept the need to formally regulate the river at bay. Eighteen months ago, groundwork began that will bring the river into the state's regulatory regime. Most of the work lies on the Yampa's main stem. Because it has never been regulated, just 12 people manage the Yampa River. Eight of them are women. Most are ranchers who have worked in the mountains above Steamboat and on the sagebrush plains to the west all their adult lives. The river, in some ways, has been the one thing these independent, self reliant Coloradans could count on, even as coal mines opened and closed, and crops flourished and failed. High season in water work begins in the spring, when the river swells with mountain snowmelt and ranchers begin irrigating their fields. By midsummer, the work is in full swing. The weather is hot. Endless, heavy ranch gates must be opened and closed. Diversion structures must be located, examined and mapped. Behind this first phase is a need to deliver water for endangered fish from Elkhead Reservoir 127 miles downstream to a spot near Dinosaur National Monument. The river district, a consortium of water users and state and federal agencies spent $30.5 million enlarging Elkhead Reservoir, just outside Craig, to store more water to meet their obligations to the fish, as the Endangered Species Act requires. (Source: Rocky 11~lountain News) ~4 20