Water war brewing in W. Utah

Dean Baker, who leads his family's Baker Ranch in Baker, Nevada, has developed 30-odd springs in Snake Valley, which support 2,000 head of cattle and rotating crops of alfalfa and hay.

"There is no way that you can develop the kind of water they're talking about, not just irrigate where there's recharge, but pump it out of the basin," Baker told the Deseret Morning News editorial board this week. "There's nothing to lead me to believe that's the case."

Baker said that the water authority's plan, which is going through the environmental impact statement process at the Bureau of Land Management, isn't feasible, will put ranchers out of business and will lead to environmental damage.

Not only would water tables drop and aquifers dry up, but indigenous plants also would die off, which will affect wildlife and human life, said Cecil Garland, a rancher in Callao in the lower end of Snake Valley. And, he said, existing springs, wells and aquifers will give way to the creeping forces of Ice Age water from the Salt Desert — alkaline, toxic and unusable — flowing underground, which are currently kept at bay by the pressures provided by the sweet water.

Different data

Or perhaps not. Mulroy points to data showing that the Snake Valley has a "safe yield" of 100,000 acre-feet of water per year. Of that, she said, about 20,000 acre-feet are in use. The water authority's proposal seeks an additional 25,000 acre-feet.

"So, even with our 25,000 additional acre-feet, that barely comes close to half of the perennial use," Mulroy said.

Jerald Anderson, a rancher from EskDale, disagrees.

"This is a desert, and if excess water is available, we'd sure like to know where it's going," he said. "Because of the drought, our water levels have dropped consistently over the last several years, and we have yet to observe any recharge from this wet year. Water travels slowly underground."

The eight-year drought has dried up streams and baked wetlands to clay, Garland said. The greasewood, a small deciduous tree that lives on the desert, is showing signs of distress. And the effects under the SNWA plan would only make matters worse.

"If you take the greasewood off, and the wind blows — as it does for two or three weeks at a time, 35 to 40 miles per hour — you'll see dust in the air, dust as fine as face powder, in the air 3,000 or 4,000 feet," Garland said. "This would affect Fish Springs Wildlife Refuge. This would affect the Utah Test and Training Range. This would affect the wilderness area that is proposed in the Deep Creek Mountains."

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