BOARD01415

• Board Meeting Date: 11/1/1978
• Description: Agenda, Minutes, Resolution
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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Also, we have to have the filtration. - with these sprinkler systems,
you don't need but nearly half the filtration. For instance, the
screening is a 50 mesh screen for the little sprinklers. For the drip
system, it is 200 mesh. That difference is really expensive. This
again, shows the Orchard Mesa area and the kind of water ~e have coming
off from there in the wintertime. Everything freezes, and it comes off
there in the wintertime, and we get one heck of a lot of water going
through that basin.

The water is pumped up. On the left, you see the power plant. We can
generate power from the power canal. On the right is the pumping plant.
The water is dropped down through those tubes into the generators, and
it pumps at the same time. They are both on the same shaft. It pumps
underground up to these upper and lower canals. We are pumping, in the
heat of the summer, somewhere around 200 cfs up to both canals, the
upper and lower canal. If we had storage, it would be somewhere in
the neighborhood of 60 cfs.

We had been looking a little bit at storage placed up there, and just
below that highest hill there where you see the large packing shed,
there is an area where we think it would be very good for water storage.

This, again, is another look at the storage area. This is where the
dam would be placed. We would store enough water to take care of about
a week's supply in the. main.

Here is another place where we might have storage.

Now, these areas have to be drilled and assessed by. the Bureau. But
what we really want to do is make sure that they understand what we
are interested in. We can't go with the old system just redone. It
has to come into the 20th century as far as irrigation practices are
concerned.

I just wanted to show you some-of the fruit that we have in this area
and what is possible there. Production is almost unlimited. Five, six,
seven, eight bushels per tree is possible if you go into this thing and
really push it. But the way we are now, four bushels is just almost
maximum in the valley today.

Gentlemen, that is my presentation. I hope we can do something to urge
the Bureau to do a better job for us there in that area.

MR. STAPLETON: How do we get this story to the Bureau tangibly? In
other words, what ~o we do? What is your recommendation that we do?

MR. LONGLEY:
that would say
pipe system on

I would say that if the Board has some kind of resolution
to the Bureau of Reclamation, "We need to have a closed
the south side of the Grand Valley."

MR. STAPLETON: Do you have some recommendation, Larry?

MR. SPARKS: I think we have all, in the past, had our heads in the sand.
We have built a lot of projects predicated on practices existing a 100

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