FERNLEY, Nev. (AP) – A Nevada city founded a century ago by pioneers drawn to the West by the promise of free land and cheap water in the desert is trying to prevent the U.S. government from renovating a 115-year-old canal land irrigation with a plan that would eliminate the leakage of water that locals have long used to fill their own domestic wells.
A federal judge denied Fernley’s offer last year to delay plans to coat parts of the Truckee Canal with concrete to make it safer after it burst and flooded nearly 600 homes in 2008.
Now, lawyers in the town half an hour east of Reno have filed a new lawsuit accusing the US Bureau of Reclamation of not illegally considering the expected damage to municipal water supplies and hundreds of users of private wells exploring groundwater based on what they say are mandatory water reserves, some dating back to World War II.
Security aside, the bureau says the loss of federally owned water from the earth channel is a waste of US taxpayers’ money. The city says the government shares responsibility for its dependence on the unintended subsidy provided by the spill, in part because there was never an objection.
“Fernley has the right to continue reloading the Truckee Canal in accordance with public use doctrine because conditions of infiltration have continued for 115 years,” the suit said.
Over time, local users have become “totally dependent on channel infiltration to keep the aquifer recharged and in healthy condition,” the process said. He says Fernley spent $ 40 million on a state-of-the-art water treatment facility based on that dependency.
“You (the government) created the system and are now essentially withdrawing it and claiming it is not your problem,” Fernley’s former mayor, David Stix Jr., told the Associated Press on Friday.
A decision is crucial for the city and neighboring farms in the high desert, where only 15 centimeters of rain fall annually. And the dispute could have far-reaching implications for one in five U.S. farmers who use water supplied by federal channels in 17 western states to irrigate an area three times the size of Connecticut.
Built in 1905, the Truckee Canal was part of the Newlands Project in honor of the Nevada congressman, whose legislation led to the creation of the Bureau of Reclamation three years earlier. It was the first major irrigation project in the West – with the goal of “making the desert flourish”.
Fernley’s lawyers say it was a great success, attracting settlers who developed the West. But they say the new project pulls the carpet from their descendants in the city of 23,000 inhabitants, where some still raise cattle and grow alfalfa and melons.
The agency says that lining the canal at a cost of about $ 148 million is necessary to prevent another costly disaster like the canal break in 2008. The Truckee-Carson Irrigation District that manages the canal system has resolved a class action lawsuit over US $ 18.1 million in 2016, with 1,200 victims of the flood that damaged 590 homes.
The agency has studied the efficiency of channel coverings for decades and, in recent years, has intensified research into new ways to combat infiltration with remote sensing by satellite, soil sensors that detect soil moisture and sediment temperature.
Last month, the bureau joined NASA and HeroX, a crowdsourcing platform, to sponsor a two-year contest with a $ 360,000 prize to foster other innovations.
This week, the agency awarded $ 42 million in donations to 55 projects in 13 states, from Kansas to Arizona and the Pacific Northwest, to improve water supply efficiency and generate more hydropower.
Bureau officials were unable to immediately estimate the amount of water leaking from canals nationally, but in neighboring California, he said that a third of the water that passes through a stretch of the All-American Canal is lost to leak annually – about 168,500 acres. -foots (207 million cubic meters).
One acre foot (1,233 cubic meters) of water covers one acre (0.40 hectares) – approximately the size of a football field – and one foot deep (0.3 meters). California’s average households use half an acre of water each year.
In 1985, the US Geological Survey estimated the natural recharge, like rain, in Fernley’s groundwater basin was 600 acres-feet (740,000 cubic meters) – a fraction of the 18,000 acres-feet (22 million cubic meters) estimated to leak annually into the uncoated channel aquifer.
The bureau broadly agrees with the simulations made by a specialist Fernley hired in 2018, who estimates that 13% of the more than 400 domestic wells in Fernley would dry out in one year if the artificial recharge ends and 71% would stop working over 40 years. .
The bureau did not respond to the lawsuit filed on March 10 in the federal court in Reno, but its final environmental impact statement said in September that Fernley “has no legal right to the continued existence of the Truckee Canal sewage”.
“The city’s claim to drain water is not valid under Nevada law,” the agency said. “The use of canal infiltration in the city is not a valid water delivery project.”