Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
So it was a lot easier to get flood control projects than irrigation projects because you
didn't have to go out and round up a bunch of irrigators like you have to get irrigators,
You don't
irrigation districts, and so forth, to repay the costs of the irrigation storage.
have to do that with flood control. You just have to come up with a good B/C
[benefit/cost] ratio.
So the Department of Interior, in their wisdom, decided that they would use some of their
power revenues to help pay for irrigation. That was a big controversy in years gone by
when some of the power revenues would be used to help pay for the cost of the irrigation.
The way they did that, they had--oh what did they call them, they were area accounts or
something like. In a particular part of the country, in all the Bureau of Reclamation
projects in that particular area, the benefits from all of those would go into a common
pool--or I mean the power, irrigation, and all those things would all go together--to help
pay for the projects.
If there didn't happen to be as much irrigation benefits as the cost allocation indicated
there should have been, that didn't really make much difference as long as they got enough
benefits from all the other purposes, too. So it helped the irrigators get storage for a lot
less then they probably would have had to pay otherwise. It helped develop the west, you
know, doing that sort of thing.
Q.
Oh yes, I guess they're finding out in California now the requirements for them to pay
l
more for the water.
A
Well, then, of course, as time goes on, these water rights situations are really a tough
thing out in the west because the western states allocate water and the appropriation,
appropriative rights, were first in time you know and get the water. If you had an
appropriated right dated way back when, nobody else could get the water you had. The
way they used the water early on was kind of frightening too because if you had an
appropriated right
The problem was people had a right to this water, and they could keep on taking it out of
the stream all summer long or all during the irrigation season. Obviously, they weren't
running it onto their irrigated lands all the time. It would just run on through their
channels and systems on down the river.
But then, with a lot more coordination and cooperation, they got these people to shut down
their gates when they weren't using it, so other people would have the water available, so
it would stay in the stream. The next guy downstream would get his--who had second
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