12-30 IAT El Nino

Last week I told you that the Idaho Department of Water Resources or IDWR has been in something of a water war with ag producers who get their irrigation water from the Boise River system reservoirs. IDWR wants to count flood control releases against stored water rights and lots of farmers are up in arms about it. I talked with Matt Weaver, deputy director of the Idaho Dept. of Water Resources. "Some of the criticism that I would like to address is the fact that the department is proposing some new, you hear terms like schemes or theory for accounting and that is factually not true. We have not changed anything in three decades. We don't think the current accounting practices lead to some of the catastrophic predictions that people are stating out there that we are going to lose water in June and that it will lead to large economic impacts on the agricultural industry and the reason that is not the case is because we have been accounting this way for 30 years and there is no evidence to support those dire predictions." All of this confusion and angst of course would be best assuaged if there was plenty of water to go around. Enter El Niño and Ron Abramovich, water supply specialist for the USDA NRCS: "Is the heavy snow pack primarily due to the El Niño effect? That's interesting because it's a strong El Niño but they don't always behave as they typically do. This year the storms are coming in to the Pacific Northwest. We are in pretty good shape right now. They are now hitting other parts of the West and we will take what we can get."