Housing issues tread through water policy

The following commentary appeared in the Jauary 27, 2006 edition of the Peninsula Daily News.

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Housing issues tread through water policy

By Martha Ireland

Foreseen consequences of changing the Sequim-Dungeness Valley's agricultural irrigation system will have an impact on some of the region's most vulnerable residents.

"We finished piping between Taylor Cutoff to just past Hooker," president Gene Adolphsen reported to the Dungeness Irrigation Group's annual meeting Saturday.

Monday, at my Serenity House adult family shelter job in Port Angeles, I fielded a call from a disabled low-income renter on Taylor Cutoff Road.

The well is dry, the landlord is disinclined to drill deeper, and a tight rental market offers few options.

Replacing roughly five miles of open irrigation ditches with pipes nearly halved the amount of water that irrigators remove from the Dungeness River during the May to Sept. 15 irrigation season.

It's no surprise that shallow wells are drying up.

The official response is that those wells should be drilled deeper for health reasons.

Furthermore, aquifer recharge is now deemed an inappropriate use of irrigation water.

In fact, the state Department of Ecology wants further restrictions in irrigation season withdrawals, and none thereafter, Adolphsen said.

To meet livestock's year-round water needs, Ecology is "talking about grant money to drill individual stock wells so we can cut the ditch off Sept. 15," he said.

When farmers began irrigating the Sequim-Dungeness prairie in the early 1900s, conserving water meant using and reusing fresh water multiple times before letting it flow into the salty Strait.

Modern wisdom views water conservation as keeping water in the rivers, ostensibly for the benefit of fish, rather than using it to water land.

This concept is illustrated by the in-stream flow rule proposed last year to constrict water use in Water Resource Inventory Area 17, which covers much of eastern Jefferson County, and by the grant-funded piping projects that take irrigation ditches permanently off-line after more than a century of feeding the upper aquifer.

Piping is a conservation strategy that delivers some benefits to farmers.

"We noticed a lot more dependable water," Adolphsen said.

"On a hot day, everybody turns on [water]. Trees drink a horrendous amount of water, and we have a hard time getting water from top to bottom.

"(With piping) we've almost cut our usage in half and are giving better service."

But piping affects other elements of the ecosystem — human and vegetative.

For example, after the ditch along the east end of Spath Road was piped, an alder hedgerow died.

Seven years of drought — culminating in last summer's record low rainfall — further depleted aquifers.

The natural weather cycle has washed away the drought, but even amid record rainfall, it will be years before the aquifer fully recovers.

Water issues sometimes appear to be used as a tool to deter development, as seen in the lawsuit delaying Jefferson County Public Utillity District's Marrowstone Island water system.

In contrast, Clallam County irrigators find that changes inspired by conservation sometimes help resolve conflicts with residential neighbors.

"Parkwood won't bother us anymore," Adolphsen said, referring to a lengthy feud over the formerly open ditch that edged the dairy farm-turned-retirement-complex.

Leftover pipe will be used to "nip in the bud a trouble spot above Costco" where the ditch has drawn complaints from people involved in new construction, he added.

"It's not much fun to put pipe in just to outrun development," Adolphsen said.

"It's supposed to be for conservation, but this is Sequim, so that's what we do."

Martha Ireland is a writer-editor who served as a Clallam County commissioner from 1996 to 1999. She lives with her husband, Dale, and "dritters" in the Carlsborg area. Her column appears every Friday.
Email: irelands@olypen.com.

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