people living near the canal — mostly residents of Deschutes River Woods and Woodside Ranch — are fighting the piping plan in order to retain some seepage. Save Arnold Canal, a community-led grassroots movement, believes seepage will keep the ground saturated in the months when water is available.
Deschutes County commissioners heard hours of testimony both for and against an application to allow potential low-density housing development on just over 700 acres of land off NW Lower Bridge Road, west of Terrebonne. The hearing Wednesday pitted concerns about housing availability against issues of water use, farmland affordability and rural development.
For thousands of years, Native tribes in this area have relied on Nch’i-Wána, or “the great river,” for its salmon and steelhead trout, and its surrounding areas for the fields bearing edible roots, medicinal herbs and berry bushes as well as the deer and elk whose meat and hides are used for food and ritual.
Central Oregon has been challenged for years by a severe drought stemming from low precipitation in the Cascades. Some variation in annual precipitation is natural over multi-decade cycles, but a warming planet has deepened those cycles. Oregon’s snowpack, which drives the volume of water in the Deschutes Basin, has been declining for decades and is likely to continue doing so, state climate scientists predict.
The Deschutes Basin’s eight irrigation districts, which deliver water from the basin’s rivers to its farmers through those canals, have a key role to play in water conservation. Replacing those antiquated canals with pipes could save those loses and return over 100,000 acre-feet of water to the river, a 2019 study found.
Urgent and comprehensive large-scale actions in the Columbia River basin will be needed to meet mid-range salmon and steelhead abundance goals set by the Columbia Basin Partnership Task Force in 2020, according to a draft report by NOAA Fisheries released nearly a month ago by the White House.
A judge has ruled federal fishing regulators violated the Endangered Species Act when they approved commercial trolling of chinook salmon in Alaska.
There are still some around who remember what things were like in the Prineville valley before the construction of Bowman Dam was completed in 1961. Government reports from 1903 and earlier noted how small and warm and stagnant the Crooked River was in this region during the summer.
On Bend’s southern outskirts, canals and ditches are already dry due to extreme drought conditions this summer, forcing farmers to reduce their herd size or give up their farms altogether. But a conservation strategy by Arnold Irrigation District, which has supplied water to the area for 117 years, could extend the life of the irrigation season as soon as next year.
