The moisture pouring from the sky last week washed out bridges and roads, damaged homes and businesses, and forced people to evacuate their homes. However, it also greatly improved the drought situation in the Four Corners.
Dolores Water Conservancy District general manager Ken Curtis says SnoTel sensors show that moisture in the mountains is five to six times what it would normally be in the month of October.
“The mountains have done real well,” he said.
And while the precipitation wasn’t nearly enough to fill McPhee Reservoir, which was extremely low before September, it has boosted the water in the reservoir by some 20,000 acre-feet.
The rainfall, combined with the fact that irrigation companies had shut down their operations early, sent the reservoir’s water level skyrocketing, Curtis said.
The precipitation also pushed the Dolores River, which had been crawling along at about 132 cubic feet per second late in the summer, to a peak flow of 6,140 cubic feet per second on Friday night/Saturday morning, Curtis said.
He said that many of the areas that saw the most flooding, such as places along the San Juan and Animas rivers, didn’t actually receive that much direct rainfall.
“The mountains are really where the flooding came from,” he said. “The mountains really got hit and then it ran down and caused the flooding.”
Much of the water wound up in Lake Powell, which has been at historic lows. Lake Powell’s level now sits about 7.1 feet above where it was two weeks ago, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
However, despite predictions of a super El Niño this winter, there’s no guarantee that next summer will be less hot and dry than this one was.
“We’re on the border of the El Niño effect,” Curtis said. “Everybody’s getting excited about it. It helps, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Storms can easily bypass the Four Corners area, he said. In addition, it’s critical that temperatures drop and stay cold this winter to keep the snowpack in place until spring.
“We need the colder temperatures that usually hit around Halloween,” he said. “We don’t have a ton of snow up there in the mountains. I think a lot has melted.”
Still, the precipitation did a great deal to alleviate the long-term drought.
“It’s a great start and the ground moisture is much better than it was for the last couple of years,” Curtis said.
