Snake River Plain Aquifer Re-Charge

David Sparks Ph.D.

 Not along ago, we covered a story in which proposals were being made to recharge the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer by releasing water into a variety of irrigation canals. Experts said that gravity would act to recharge the aquifer. Well here’s an update. This year between March and late May over 78,000 acre-feet of water was recharged into the ESPA through the canals of 3 irrigation districts and 3 canal companies at a cost of about $170,000.

 I asked Division Administrator with the Idaho Department of Water Resources Hal Anderson if this was a bargain. “$3 an acre-foot is a real bargain. When you figure if we were going to build new storage to store that water to release it and use it later in the year we’re talking in the neighborhood of $2000-$5000/acre-foot to build new storage to keep that water. $3/acre-foot allows us to take advantage of times when we’ve got more flow in the river than would normally be released during flood control, run it through the existing canal systems and recharge the aquifer in a system that we already have in place at very little cost. It’s a very cost effective approach to help us to add some additional water to our aquifer.”