|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
NACHES, Wash. – The Yakima-Tieton Irrigation Canal, a small-scale engineering wonder cut into the face of soaring basalt cliffs in central Washington, is a precarious and endangered 12-mile channel that supplies irrigation water to some of the state’s most valuable farmland.
The water it carries from the Tieton River nurtures orchards across 35,000 acres of the western Yakima Valley, which is to Washington as the Central Valley is to California – a region of high-value tree fruit and multibillion-dollar harvests that is an agricultural powerhouse only because of ready access to irrigation. Without supplemental water, this arid land of apples and cherries, pears and apricots would revert to its natural sagebrush and grassland ecosystem and the economies of its small farm towns would wither.
The farmland bounty enabled by the Yakima-Tieton canal has been at risk of failure for more than a year following the Retreat Fire, which burned 45,601 acres of primarily state and federal land in Yakima County in July 2024.
The fire, the second largest in Washington last year, torched the steep slopes and rocky drainages above the Yakima-Tieton canal. After the flames were extinguished, the land came unglued. Boulders the size of garbage cans tumbled down the hillsides, gouging holes in the canal and cracking its mortar lining. Dead trees, some 20 feet in length or more, were uprooted and fell onto it. The fire’s extreme heat compromised the canal’s concrete core. To date, technicians with the Yakima-Tieton Irrigation District have documented over 2,000 spots where the canal is leaking at its seams.
“The lifeblood of this community is on the line and it’s coming apart right now,” said Travis Okelberry, manager of the Yakima-Tieton Irrigation District.
This month, Okelberry submitted an application to the Bureau of Reclamation for a $240 million project to replace the canal. The district had been assessing an eventual successor to the 115-year-old water line. Now the need is immediate.
High-severity wildfires like the Retreat Fire are an annual menace growing worse as a warming climate collides with overgrown, tinderbox forests. These fires and the watershed alterations they produce are an emerging risk to the infrastructure that provides water and power to irrigation systems in the western states.
Irrigation leaders could not point to any catastrophic crop losses due to infrastructure failures from wildfire. But there have been many close calls.
In 2021 the Schneider Springs Fire burned 113,689 acres one drainage basin to the north of the Retreat Fire. Just downstream is the Naches-Selah Irrigation District’s canal. Justin Harter, the district manager, said that high volumes of sediment and debris infiltrated the canal in 2023 following heavy rains that summer over the burn area. “It looked like a chocolate milkshake coming down the river,” he said. The debris clogged the screens that keep fish from being drawn into the canal. Sediment settled out at the bottom of the canal, cutting its capacity before being dredged out. “We ended up with a muddy mess in our system.”
In 2020, the East Troublesome Fire broke out on Colorado’s western slopes. Sediment and debris flowed toward the reservoirs and canals that supply the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which is operated by Northern Water and provides irrigation water to roughly 600,000 acres. There was concern that the project would shut down from the loss of power, but that did not happen. Last year, the Alexander Mountain Fire burned so close that one of Northern Water’s canals acted as a fire break.
In both cases, said Jeff Stahla, Northern Water’s communications director, the fires presented tangible risks, but the agency’s infrastructure came out relatively unscathed.
The Almeda Fire, in September 2020, flared in southern Oregon and burned the towns of Talent and Phoenix. Jack Friend, manager of Medford Irrigation District, said that fire took out power to its diversion structure and the canal dried out for two days. The fire also burned part of a 48-inch-diameter water supply pipe buried underground. A 240-foot section of the plastic pipe had to be replaced.
These and other events caught the attention of the Family Farm Alliance, a voice for western irrigators. Dan Keppen, the alliance’s executive director, said wildfire and federal forest management has been a top priority for his board in the last five years.
“Those federal lands overlay the upper watersheds that supply the water for irrigation districts,” Keppen said. “The manner in which they’re managed has an impact on our water supply.”
‘How Do You Replace Something Like That?’
Perhaps no place in the western states today better exemplifies the risk to irrigation from wildfire than the Yakima-Tieton canal.
As Okelberry drove west on U.S. Route 12, which follows the course of the Naches and Tieton rivers, he recounted the history of the canal. Completed 115 years ago as one of the Bureau of Reclamation’s first irrigation projects, the structure predates the road. Mules and a short-gauge rail line ferried construction supplies up the canyon. Reclamation still owns the canal, but the irrigation district is responsible for operations and maintenance.
The gravity-fed system begins in a forest of Douglas firs and ponderosa pines not far from the Tieton River. Within a few miles, however, it is perched along sheer cliff faces to maintain its gentle grade.
“How do you replace something like that?” Okelberry said, gesturing at the thin canal a hundred feet or more above the river.
In short, slowly and piecemeal. Section by section, the canal would be replaced over a period of eight to 16 years, Okelberry said. The speed depends on funding and worker availability.
In the interim, smaller fixes have been necessary. Twice this year, the district has shut down the canal to patch leaks. In the event that larger sections need to be replaced, the district has already purchased lengths of pipeline. These are similar to “pipe bridges” that are in place in four sections where the canal washed out in the 1980s and 1990s. If emergency repairs are needed during the irrigation season, workers must act quickly to shut off water to the canal and restore it.
“The work has to be done in three weeks because the orchards will die,” Okelberry said. Not only that, the canal provides water for fire suppression in the towns of Tieton and Cowiche. A malfunctioning or inoperable canal is a risk to their safety.
Okelberry hopes that a weakened federal government that is being riven by budget and staff cuts will still be able to muster support for his canal. The entire Washington congressional delegation has signed a letter endorsing the $240 million replacement project, which will be part open channel, part tunnel.
Yakima-Tieton’s application to the Bureau of Reclamation requires a 35 percent local cost share. Okelberry said his district would probably take on debt to pay its portion and that smaller growers might not survive financially. “There’s no cheap, easy fix here,” he said.
Okelberry, just two years into the job, said nothing in his previous work experience prepared him for the all-consuming demands of post-fire recovery. Before managing the irrigation district he was employed at Richland Energy Services, a municipal power provider. He came to that position from the Washington Department of Transportation, where he said his only emergencies were oversized trucks striking bridges.
Since the fire Okelberry has been a road warrior, traveling to the state capital and Washington, D.C., to educate lawmakers about his district’s vulnerability.
“It has been the most stressful year of my life,” he said. “So much is at stake.”
The irrigation district’s emergency response was informed by post-fire assessments completed by the state and federal government. Intensity maps from the U.S. Forest Service pointed out areas where the forest and soils burned hottest and are most prone to erosion. Maps produced by the Washington Department of Natural Resources identified drainages most susceptible to falling rocks and flash floods. Hydrologists told Okelberry to expect peak flows in the drainages below the most severe burns to increase dozens of times their typical volume.
Okelberry used those maps to prioritize which areas of the canal to reinforce against landslides and erosion. The district installed 12,000 feet of corrugated metal atop the canal to protect against debris. Workers patrol the canal daily to monitor for structural failures. “Every day we have eyes on the canal,” Okelberry said.
To date, about $6 million in state and district funds has been spent on canal repairs, response, and risk reduction, Okelberry said.
Collin Haffey, the post-fire recovery program manager at the Washington Department of Natural Resources, was called in to coordinate the emergency response and facilitate funding, planning, and permits. He used an athletic analogy to describe Okelberry’s task.
“This is the hardest thing you’re going to do in your working career,” Haffey recalled telling him. “Because you’re going from running a sprint to running a marathon.”
The sprint was the fire itself, which was extinguished in a matter of weeks. The endurance event now in front of Okelberry and the rest of his staff is the altered watershed that threatens their economic lifeline.
Even as the memory of the flames recedes, dead ponderosa pines, loose boulders, and water-repellent soils on unstable slopes will persist as hazards for years.