In the Media

A new series of free, public events about the Crooked River watershed is coming to Prineville, starting this July. Your Watershed: Community Conversations is a participatory forum where local experts and neighbors will explore the environmental and ecological conditions, trends, and solutions around the Crooked River watershed and its inhabitants. The six-part series will cover water, recreation, fire, flora and fauna, community resources and land management.

Oregon water regulators want to impose stricter rules for drilling new irrigation wells next year to preserve groundwater levels and prevent over-pumping.

Though the season’s high rainfall and low temperatures have mitigated what could have been a much worse situation, much of Oregon is still enduring a prolonged “mega-drought” that’s afflicting the entire West.

Jefferson County farmers and ranchers will receive a slightly higher allotment of water this summer from the North Unit Irrigation District due to favorable weather conditions over the past two months.

With the thousands of miles of quality salmon habitat in the upper Columbia River, a restored chinook run there could add significantly to the number of anadromous fish in the entire basin. The tribes of the upper Columbia River Basin — the Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and Colville, along with first nations in Canada — aim to do just that.

The latest round of wet storms in a cool, rainy late spring was sending rivers and creeks rising Saturday across the Northwest and on the High Desert, where Tumalo Creek and the Deschutes River near Bend were running high, swift and muddy.

The amount of precipitation that fell in the Central Oregon Cascades last month was the highest since the late 1990s, offering some relief to the parched forested mountains ahead of fire season.

The Water Resources Development Act of 2022 approved by the House of Representatives Wednesday includes a lengthy section called “Columbia River Basin Restoration” and would require an inter-agency assessment of the four lower Snake River dams’ impact on fish and wildlife.