Vernon
You'd forecast how much runoff you're going to expect to get before the beginning of the
irrigation season. If you were doing a good job you would draw down far enough so you
could, when the irrigation season started, you'd be right at the top of the joint pool.
If you missed it, you wouldn't be full. You wouldn't have enough water for irrigation.
If you didn't draw it down far enough, then you might not be able to control the flood.
So it was kind of a balancing thing there. You tried to avoid missing it too far either way.
Q ..
Now that's where all these statistics that are gathered allow you to model that more
closely. So your margin of error would be a heck of a lot less now than it was, say 30
years ago.
A ..
Yes, it seems like the problem is you run into a unique situation that you never had before.
Like, I was trying to remember what, what year was it, `82 or something like that, that
they had a big flood on the Colorado. But, anyway, they run into a situation then where
they got a real heavy snow late in the spring where the temperatures got real hot right after
this heavy snow. There was no way of forecasting this.
Q ..
Okay, on the Colorado River.
A
Well, anyway, what happened that year, they had gone through the spring without a
terrible lot of runoff. They weren't expecting a whole lot of runoff, so they didn't have
much storage left in the joint use storage. Along comes this big snowstorm late in the
spring and then high temperatures right after the snowstorm when all this snow melted real
quickly and ran off. They had a big flood.
There was no previous incidence like that, as severe as that, that they could use.
Whenever you make up your rules for operating, you look back over the historical
records, and you try to devise rules that will handle all those previous situations. But,
usually, you run into ones like this unique situation as very difficult to handle because
when it happens that late in the spring, you don't have much room to fool around with
there. You're getting close to the irrigation season, and you can't keep the pool way
down.
So when you get a late storm like that, you're in bad shape. You just don't have the
storage available to take care of the flood. So you're bound to have some damage from
those kind of floods. There's just no way you can do anything about it. They had a lot
of controversy and argument and so forth about the people that had the reservoirs out
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