Ditch companies race runo≠
REPAIRS NEEDED AFTER MILLIONS IN DAMAGE FROM FALL FLOODING
Battered by floods last fall and facing spring runoff from aboveaverage snowpack, Front Range ditch companies are scrambling to make repairs.
September’s floods did tens of millions of dollars in damage to those ditches— fromthe Boulder Creek basin in the south to the Cache La Poudre and Big and Little Thompson basins up north.
Some of the most extensive damage occurred in the St. Vrain River and Left Hand Creek watersheds, where 43 of 94 ditches and reservoirs were damaged.
The damage totaled about $18 million, according to Sean Cronin, executive director of the St. Vrain & Left Hand Water Conservancy District.
Ditch companies control the water rights to irrigation ditches and must maintain them.
The Left Hand Ditch Co. is typical of most such entities: It’s privately held and owned by shareholders— in the case of Left Hand, 460 shareholders.
Sixteen percent of its shares are owned by the Left Hand Water District and goes toward drinking water, and the rest goes to agriculture.
In the Allen’s Lake diversion, both the dam and head gate were wiped out, and in the narrow riverbed of Left Hand Canyon, the only way to replace them is to divert the river, build half the structure, then move the river again and build the other half.
“We’ll get that (side) done and then we’ll move the river back over,” said Terry Plummer, the company’s vice president. “What we’re doing is racing, we’re racing the runoff.”
The Left Hand Ditch Co. has received about $3.3 million in emergency loans and $40,000 in grants from the Colorado Water Conservation Board. It has also applied for relief money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Plummer said.
“It is, it has been, a race, certainly for folks with irrigation ditches,” said Dave Nettles, a division engineer for the Colorado Division ofWater Resources.