Around 125 people attended the First Annual One Truckee River Stakeholder Forum last week at the McKinley Arts and Culture Center on the banks of the river in downtown Reno.  The forum brought together knowledgeable people from public safety, academia, government, and non-government groups (The Nature Conservancy, Great Basin Bird Observatory and many others) to discuss what to include in a new overall plan for the Truckee River. Sponsors of the event were the Nevada Land Trust and Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful.

Since the forum just last week, NLT and KTMB have released a Request for Proposal for a qualified firm to write a plan which will address all the issues discussed at the forum and culminate with presentations of the final plan before the cities of Reno and Sparks and Washoe County and “2-3 presentations” to the stakeholder group. The plan is to address the Truckee River reach that includes most of the Truckee Meadows from the Mayberry area to the Reno-Sparks Water Reclamation Facility, approximately 15 miles of the river. Broadly, the plan is to address the following “emerging issues”:

• Water Quality
• Social Issues
• Stewardship
• Ecosystem
• Quality of Life
• Public Safety
• Funding
• Recreation
• Education

Most residents and visitors to the Truckee Meadows are most familiar with this portion of the river.  We hope that this plan will result in improvement to the river experience and the improved function of the river: more space for the river, protecting and enhancing the riparian corridor and protecting native trees and acknowledging that keeping water in the river is essential for the river to remain a resource for all of us.  Likewise, public safety and preventing vandalism along this river reach is essential to gaining the support of Truckee Meadows residents. (See my recent post of the good and the ugly along the Truckee River trail through the Truckee Meadows.)

I support the current effort as a positive step that, hopefully, will lead to improving the Truckee River through the Truckee Meadows.

Floating the river is a popular summer activity which depends on adequate river flows.

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The two rainstorms from the over the last week in NW Reno really helped the garden.  Plants are shining bright green as of early October.  The small lawn – mostly brown before – is turning green again.  So, we did our part to save water in the Truckee Meadows. We turned off our sprinkler system for at least the next week.  We also cut back on watering beginning in September because plants don’t need as much water when night-time temperatures lower along with cooler days.  It is great to see rain anytime of the year, but it’s important to remember that these kinds of storms don’t end the drought – or even make much of a dent in it.

A quick check of Lake Tahoe shows how the recent rain here in Reno didn’t translate into a significant drought impact.  On September 20 Lake Tahoe’s elevation was 6,222.0 feet.  Due to evaporation loses the lake continued to drop through the end of September to 6,221.9 feet.  The rain over the first days of October up to the 4th saw the lake rise 6,221.95 feet, but today it is back down to 6,221.9 feet.  Bottom line: the Lake stands 1.1 feet below its natural outlet – so no water can flow into the Truckee River. More than a foot of rain is needed to raise the level of Lake back to its outlet.  The small rain is helpful to forests and people – and the Lake a little – but we need a lot more to truly make a difference in terms of this long-term drought.

Lake Tahoe is over 1,600 feet deep and contains a vast amount of fresh water, but has a very small watershed.

My calculation: we’re 15 years into this drought with only two above average years and a significant deficit in precipitation and river flows over that period.

Lake Tahoe’s elevation from September 28 to October 5

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“KTMB’s Truckee River Cleanup Day is Saturday, September 26, 2015, from 9 a.m.-noon. Volunteers are needed for trash pickup, invasive weed removal, river park beautification and other activities at cleanup locations along the Truckee River in Reno, Sparks and Washoe County. For more information, visit http://ktmb.org/ktmbs-truckee-river-cleanup-day/“

With fires burning from California to Washington state, westerners are looking for storms bringing rain and snow to offer relief and an end to seemingly endless days of smoky skies.  However, the NOAA Seasonal Drought Outlook isn’t offering much hope for most of the far west including Nevada.

“Although some drought improvement is expected across parts of the Southwest due to increased chances of enhanced September monsoon rainfall and then later from possible enhancement of the autumn subtropical Pacific jet from the strong El Niño, long-term hydrological drought is likely to continue in the Far West. Since SON is a climatologically dry for most of the lower 48 States (although November is wet in the Pacific Northwest), persistence is likely for most of California, except some possible improvement in the southeastern desert.” – NOAA: US Seasonal Drought Outlook (emphasis added)

NOAA Sept-Oct-Nov 2015 Seasonal Drought Outlook.

Pyramid Lake in the 19th Century (L) and Pyramid Lake in the 20th Century (R)

The Truckee River Yacht Club has been around since 1988 and was one of the early players in reshaping the Truckee River Flood Project through public participation. Today we are concerned about the health – even the survivability – of the Truckee River itself. While the Truckee River Yacht Club has no yachts, we have worked on Truckee River protection and in-stream-flows and water quality for more than 2 decades.

We have 3 key questions for the panel today.

1. Is this a drought that will mimic the droughts of the 19th and 20th centuries? Or is the current dry spell something more?
2. How will we address the protection of rivers and lakes and wetlands and the fish and wildlife that depend on them? How will the public be educated to conserve the limited water resources of Nevada ?
3. Who are the leaders to tell Nevadans that the natural water resources of Nevada are tapped out?

We ask that the panel recognize that there are absolute limits on extraction of more water resources from already overstressed rivers and wetlands and groundwater. We also know that today the Truckee River isn’t supplying water except to those who have private storage rights like the TMWA (Truckee Meadows Water Authority, the water agency for Reno-Sparks). We know the “water rights” to use the river and actual “water” are two entirely different things. We also know that groundwater pumping borrows water from hoped for future rains. And we know that the Truckee River and its tributary streams could shrink under increased groundwater pumping.

Of course, the problem isn’t confined to just the Truckee River. The Humboldt River is dry before it reaches Rye Patch Reservoir. The Carson River is a mere trickle at Fort Churchill State Park. The Walker River doesn’t reach Walker Lake – even in average years. Washoe Lake dried up before summer even began.

Washoe Lake nearly dry in March 2015. Washoe Lake is in the Truckee River watershed.

The Truckee River was dry or nearly so at the Sparks measuring gauge for 4 days last week and for almost two days a week before that. Despite significant upstream storage capacity on the Truckee River watershed, those reservoirs are mostly depleted. Lake Tahoe stands below its rim – a condition that has now persisted for more than a year resulting in no flow into the Truckee River.

Pyramid Lake has fallen more than 25 feet in the last 15 years of mostly drought conditions. The drop is the result of a deficit of millions of acre-feet of water. Continued losses of water for the Lake threaten the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and the endangered species found there and in the Truckee River.

Pyramid Lake offers ample proof of an extended drought with steeply declining lake levels since 2000.

Our view of the drought as an inconvenience – almost a distraction – to economic pursuits leads us deeper into our current water problem. Our failure to recognize a drying trend which began firmly at the turn of this current century is part of the problem, too. Another is our denial of climate change – very likely one of the reasons for warming and drying of the western US.

Our rivers, lakes, and wetlands and our uses of water cannot be sustained if the rainfall/snowfall of the past 15 years repeats into the future. Over the next 15 or 50 years, we will have to choose what to keep and what to change. Even in good times, Reno is a desert with only an annual average of 7 inches of precipitation.

We recommend engaging all Nevadans in a discussion of where we go from here. Looking to past solutions will not solve the water crisis we face. We need national and state experts from climatology, hydrology, and natural resources to provide the facts of our current situation and what to expect, most likely, going forward. We need to engage in research to understand how to keep our rivers and lakes intact and functioning, what water uses we can continue, what water uses we need to change, and how to get the public buy-in to carry out necessary solutions.

[Note – The Governor’s Drought Forum met today at the Nevada Department of Agriculture in Sparks, NV – TRYC wasn’t invited to testify, but we did submit the above comments to the members of the Forum.]

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