BOARD00100

• Board Meeting Date: 5/11/1960
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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I

We have gone throuqh a drought cycle
during the period 1950 to 1960 and this has
been an unusual occurrence so far as the
State of Colorado is concerned. We have gone
through two of those cycles in the past
sixty years. The first cycle occurring dur-
ing the period 1930 to 1940, the second
cycle occurring during the period from 1950
to 1960. Those are abnormal periods in the
history of the southwestern United States.
So generally speaking, the historic storage
has been sufficient for any recreation or
fish and wildlife purposes; but obviously
when these periods occur the fish life is
destroyed. Then the 10,000 foot pool for a
temporary period, we think, would have ade-
quately preserved the recreation value of
John r~rtin Reservoir.

Again, we have had to balance off
economic factors; how much the Game and Fish
Commission, for instance, might want to pay
for this water; and in maintaining the pool,
the evaporation factor throughout this period.
The plan that we worked out was a hypotheti-
cal plan based upon the original purchase
of 10,000 acre~feet of water and sufficient
water annually thereafter to replace evapora-
tion so that no loss would occur to the
conservation pool.

I

There has been some misapprehension,
perhaps, as to how you operate a reservoir
under those conditions. I say that we oper-
ate every reservoir in the State of Colorado
under the same conditions. That is, we have
stream flows comingled with reservoir stor-
age. That is a common situation which occurs
with every channel reservoir in this state!
We must measure the water in and measure the
water out, because the water that comes into
almost any reservoir may belong to a number
of different appropriators, either from
direct flow or from storage rights. But
essentially the way you would operate this
reservoir or any other reservoir to see that
no loss occurs to irrigators, is that first
there must be a gauge at the face of the dam
and a reservoir profile showing the capacity
in relation to the gauge height. That's
one method of determining the inflow and of