YAKIMA, Wash.- The Yakima-Tieton Irrigation District has shut down its 115-year-old main canal for emergency repairs caused by the Retreat Fire. Trees and boulders have fallen into the canal forcing crews to tend to the damage.
Irrigation District Manager Travis Okelberry says the decision to turn off the canal entirely, opposed to only the rolling shutdowns, came during an emergency board meeting after seeing the damage caused by the fire.
“Our initial assessment was not good,” says Okelberry. “We found that we had significant damage. We had taken an impact from big boulders that were now inside the canal. We had trees that were in the canal. We had a lot of debris that was coming down the canal and making its way to our reservoir.”
Fire officials told the Irrigation District conditions were good enough to send a crew up to fix the canal. With triple digit temperatures expected this weekend, YTID decided to act now for the repairs. Doing so meant turning off all irrigation water and emptying the canal.
“We don’t want to take our chances and take risks we don’t need to,” says Okelberry. “We’re trying to be mindful of how important this resource is to our water users and we’re doing the best that we can in these unprecedented times.”
According to the District Manager, the only way to access the damage is through the canal. There are no roads that can access the canal and pathways are barely wide enough for a person and a wheelbarrow; let alone heavy machinery.
This isn’t the first time the main canal has been heavily damaged, but it’s some of the most severe damage in its lifespan.
In 1980, ash from Mount Saint Helens and mud blocked the water way and turned the canal off for 19 days. At the time, the repairs cost $1.5 million. In 2023, that would have cost YTID $5.6 million.
To repair 200 feet of the canal in 1980, crews needed to use helicopters and log yarders to move material and equipment. That option isn’t available today because of the wildfire still burning in the same forest.
“Once it backs up and that water starts overtopping the canal, it doesn’t take long before it washes out the base,” says Okelberry. “That canal is perched on the side of a hill, a very steep hill. When you lose that base, you lose that canal, and it just continues to peel itself off. Then you’ve got a huge problem to deal with and that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
Reducing the canal’s capacity ahead of time, likely avoided that “huge problem,” says Okelberry. If a tree landed on the infrastructure while at full capacity, he predicts it would have caused a landslide and taken out the entirety of the canal.
Had the entire 115-year-old canal been eliminated, Tieton, Cowiche, every YTID water user and even those off that system would feel the impact for possibly three years.
“If we’re down three weeks, four weeks, a month and a half, that would be devastating to the local economy because for those orchards to be replanted and start producing again is a three-year process,” says Okelberry.
That potential is also in the mind of the fire officials, who are including Okelberry and the Irrigation District in the daily briefings. Crews are on hand as YTID and Bureau of Reclamation crews work on the canal, protecting them and keeping them away from the fire.
“They understand the importance of our canal,” says the District Manager. “Our canal is one of their top priorities. They’re doing everything they can to help us get in and make the repairs.”
Yakima-Tieton Irrigation District plans to recharge the system on Thursday, with plans to return to the rolling shut down schedule on Friday. Still, there will need to be extra repairs after the fire is contained. For now, the priority is getting irrigation water back to the nearly 28,000 acres covered by the district.
“We know that we’ve got a long road ahead of us,” says Okelberry. “There’s a lot of damage up there and it’s not anything that we fix in the near future. We’re going to be dealing with this for quite some time.”
