RUFFIN PREVOST Billings Gazette | Posted: Saturday, March 15, 2008 12:00 am
LOVELL - Some first-time engineers tried their luck Thursday managing the Yellowtail Dam, controlling for an entire year the water levels of Bighorn Lake and the flow into the Big Horn River downstream.
"It was a big eye-opener," Lovell resident Bob Kroft said of the exercise, where people from various agencies and interest groups used computer simulations to explore different water-management scenarios.
"We all learned a lot, and it gave us a chance to see how quickly everything changes, even if you make an adjustment of only 100 or 200 cubic feet per second," said Kroft, a director of Friends of Bighorn Lake.
The simulation, developed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, was a way for members of the Big Horn River System Issues Group to see how tricky it can be to balance the often competing needs of fishing, boating, farming, power generation and flood control.
The group has met several times over the past year, and includes people from a wide array of state and federal agencies, as well as elected officials, sportsmen, business owners and others anxious to see more water in the lake and river.
Much of the talk in early meetings on the issue several months ago framed the dispute as Wyoming versus Montana, with Bureau managers caught between angry residents on both sides.
But after several thousand PowerPoint slides, a few hundred bullet-point lists and dozens of whiteboard brainstorming sessions, much of the early rancor has given way to mutual understanding, a point highlighted after Thursday's computer simulations.
"We did one simulation where our forecast didn't line up at all with the inflows, and we spent the rest of the year just trying to keep any kind of water at all in the reservoir," said Ken Frazer, a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologist who worked on a simulation team with Kroft.
"The Bureau has always done a good job managing it, but now everybody in this group understands the system better," Frazer said.
He added that the simulation "shows how complicated it is trying to manage something that can be totally at the whim of nature. And nature hasn't been very predictable lately."
Luckily, nature has been at least a little more cooperative this year, with snowpack levels at 92 percent of historic averages in the Wind River and Shoshone River drainages, and at 97 percent in the Bighorn Mountains.
"As it stands now, we're in pretty darn good shape. We're certainly better off than we were last year," said Dan Jewell, Bureau area manager
Jewell credited this winter's better precipitation for easing much of the tension over Bighorn water shortages, but also said that closer communication and ongoing education efforts were helping to turn partisans into partners in the process.
"Part of our rationale in holding these meetings has been to help increase everyone's overall understanding of how the reservoir operates," as well as for all sides to understand and share information on potentially conflicting goals, he said.
Kroft said Bureau managers did a good job in 2007 of turning a bad water year into one that all parties could better mutually endure.
More frequent and timely reactions by managers to changing conditions helped ease the pain for everyone, Kroft said.
"We're paying a lot more attention to it and trying to do a better job of managing our ability to meet the sometimes competing needs of everyone, based on the available water," Jewell said.
Seven years of ongoing drought has helped managers learn the critical importance of meeting key reservoir elevation windows in March and October of each year, he said.
The National Park Service continues to upgrade and improve facilities throughout the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, said John Keck, a Wyoming coordinator for the agency.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is helping fund a new dock at Horseshoe Bend, where the Park Service plans to contract with a food and sundries concessionaire to provide weekend services this summer.
Other projects planned for this year at the revitalized Horseshoe Bend site include a new drinking water well and providing electric hook-ups at campsites, Keck said.
But much of the long-term outlook for Horseshoe Bend and the rest of the Bighorn system will depend on the weather, and the ability for dam mangers to successfully navigate the maze of predictions, projections and competing interests.
Some worry that the decades-long weather outlook is one of increasing drought.
Jewell focused instead on a more pressing factor, reminding everyone that May, June and July are the three months each year when the region gets half its annual precipitation.