Robert Perea
With the level of water stored in Lahontan Reservoir barely a little more than half of the level from a year ago, the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District began releasing water into the Truckee Canal on Jan. 1.
TCID announced it was turning on water into the canal at 7 a.m. Jan. 1 to help supplement the reservoir until snow levels in the Carson watershed increase. While the target storage level is not a set number and is determined by a formula based on current levels and snowpack reports, the water level in Lahontan Reservoir was at 127,200 acre-feet as of Dec. 31, compared to 208,684 acre-feet on Dec. 9, 2023.
The canal will be unchecked, meaning all gates in the check structures will be fully open. With the gates unchecked, water in the canal will be flowing at faster rates compared to checked operations during the irrigation season, and TCID Director Davy Stix advised that everyone should be careful near the canal, especially around the lined section.
Even though this is typically the off-season for irrigation, Fernley Mayor Neal McIntyre was happy seeing water flowing through the canal.
“Anytime there’s water in that canal I’m pretty happy about it because it does help replenish our aquifer,” he said.
Many Fernley residents, particularly those with private wells near the canal, are still feeling the effects of water being shut off for a year in 2023 while TCID and the Bureau of Reclamation constructed a concrete lining on a portion of the canal. Once the construction was completed, the canal was reopened for part of the irrigation season last year, but was closed at the end of the irrigation season.
During the time the canal was dry, many private well owners along the canal saw the level of water in their wells drop significantly.
“Multiple residents along the canal had to redrill their wells,” McIntyre said. “A lot of those wells were drilled years ago and were only 80 feet deep, and when the canal was shut off, it cost them $20,000 to $25,000 to have the wells redrilled around 300 feet.”
In addition, water rights holders who irrigate using canal water saw pastures go fallow and trees and other vegetation die.
McIntyre said the city did see a slight drop in its well levels, but not enough to cause any harm. But he said it’s too soon to say whether water flowing through the canal this summer, and again now, is enough to raise the groundwater level.
“It’s going to take a couple of years to figure out if the aquifer is going to replenish,” McIntyre said. “It will be a while to have any data to show what the effects are.”
Meanwhile, he hopes there won’t be any other interruptions in the normal operations of the canal.
“That’s definitely our hopes, unless BOR comes up with a whole lot of money to do any more sections,” he said.
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