WATFSummaryMay2002

• Title: Task Force Meeting Minutes
• Date: 5/23/2002
• Description: Minutes
• Basin: Statewide
• Drought Mitigation - Doc Type: WATF Meeting Summary

the confluence of the St. Vrain of 1871, a call that usually only occurs in July of dry years.
Similar senior call exists in lower mainstem and some of the tributaries. The potential exists to
administer water calls into the 1860's. In fact, we had a short duration call of 1866 and we got a
little bit of a rainstorm and helped move that off a little bit. The big problem with that when it
goes to 1866, is that those folks who have augmentation water, these are people that the water in
these augmentation supplies basically divert out of priority, and allow the senior to be not entered,
they correct the injury to the senior by pulling the junior out of priority. The augmentation water
is not available because its out of priority, then that affects right on down the line. Huge impact in
many basins that are critical.

- (inaudible )..talk about reservoir being a kind of storage, it's rather misleading, because it
indicates in depression we have more water availability, usually at this time, many reservoirs are
in a bypass situation, so that they don't end up spilling, and causing damaging flows. And they're
right now trying to top off the last couple of inches the reservoir's got.

Jack- You're exactly correct. And one of the problems is just that, is that at this time of the year
we are, from a reservoir storage standpoint, not in terrible, terrible shape. Not in the critical shape
that we are truly in. Because those folks that don't have any reservoir storage, for one, they're
done. And they're not likely to see much, and I'll get into this a little bit more later. But even in
our return flows, in fact in the Arkansas Basin, 1'll highlight that. This is an interesting one on
Canon City, and I realize the spelling, I can't make those things do it right. You can see it right
here, where we are, and you can see its well below the '77, and this is at La Junta and this is a
pretty messy graph, because we get a lot of, it does pick up all the little rainstorm events, etc. But
if you're careful you can see it right ahnost on the black line there, indicating that we have no peak
runoff, this is what we're waiting for, that we're into. And again, this is done, here, we're several
weeks, not months, ahead of ...pardon?..(inaudible)....it's this blue one, right here, the mean.
We would normally be right about in here, on our way up. We're right here, and we think we're
on our way down. This gives you an idea of where our. . . we did pick up a little bit of, you might
say, moisture. Last week, we were sitting with this call, this week we're sitting about right here,
and again, I believe, in most cases we're headed down fairly soon.

This is the reservoir storage, and this will point a little bit of what you're saying, that this is our
April content, and this is our capacity. We're already in many cases not near the capacity, but this
is our May, this is where they've drawn down, and in some instances, if they maintain that rate of
drawdown, this was one week. .. let's take this one, actually Turquoise, you have to understand
how Turquoise and Twin Lakes works.. .it's not a good one for me to point to. Let's see, let's
pick.. .John Martin's as good as any. You know, we went down, what, almost 20,000 AF? Do
another, what, three or four weeks? Now I realize that the drawdown at John Martin there's some
pools, we're not going to have that quite that rapidly, but that gives you an idea of what kind of
pressure these reservoirs are going to come under. Just the point you made earlier, we're stressing
them heavily.

This is what I wanted to mention, too, even though everyone's restricting their lawn watering
irrigation, the problem is that in Colorado, everybody relies on that water being used upstream,
being used and coming back to the stream, and being used again. And if we don't have it used

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