Washington weathered its unprecedented fourth consecutive summer of water shortages this year. Such a prolonged drought creates challenges for cities, farmers and fish.
But one of the hardest-hit watersheds in the state has already worked for decades on creative solutions to water shortages, creating a model of resilience that many other regions in the country are looking to emulate.
The Yakima River Basin stretches from the crest of the Cascade Mountains at Snoqualmie Pass to the Columbia River near Richland. Five reservoirs built by the federal government in the early 1900s irrigate fertile soil that now supports a $4.5 billion agricultural economy. Today the basin grows more apples, hops, mint and winter pears than any other part of the country, as well as many other crops and hay for beef and dairy cattle.
At the end of this hot summer, we clambered into a tiny airplane at Yakima Air Terminal and donned chunky headsets hooked up to the plane’s sound system so we could talk during the flight. The nonprofit EcoFlight had organized the trip, inviting reporters to join local representatives for a flyover of the watershed.
“We’re at a critical time of the year,” said Joe Blodgett, a fisheries project manager with Yakama Nation Fisheries. “We’re in our fourth year of our drought, and there’s a lot of pull for water.”
The basin’s plan
Blodgett is an important player in a collaborative effort to address water shortages in the area called the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan. For more than a decade, the plan has worked to balance the needs of farmers, fisheries and local governments, and to find solutions. Blodgett’s tribe has fought hard to maintain the water needed to fulfill their treaty rights to fish.
“Having all these people that were once adversaries working as a partnership, we can see the movement in the basin,” Blodgett said. “We're nowhere near where we need to be as far as self-sustaining populations — or harvestable populations — of salmon. We do have all stocks that once existed in the basin returning as adult salmon. So that's a start.”
We looked out the airplane windows down at the Yakima River, squinting to see how the drought has affected the landscape. Much of the land looked remarkably green, because many pastures and fields are still irrigated. But Blodgett’s colleague, Tom Elliott, pointed to clear signs of the water shortage.
“That is a very low river right now. We’re looking at how much gravel is exposed,” Elliott said. "Very low, very warm."
That warm water harms native fish. Across the terrain whizzing by below, we saw how small diversion dams repeatedly shrink parts of the river and push them into shallow, warm slivers in the landscape.
We flew south along the Yakima to the mouth of the Columbia River and back. Along the way, we saw patches of the river that have become overgrown with water star grass, a native plant that turns stretches of the river into swamps in the drought.
“This is Benton City down here, and it is one of our worst stretches for water star grass, typically,” said Marcella Appel, the manager of the Benton Conservation District.
The grass slows the flow of the river, blocks irrigation and recreational use and gets worse as the drought continues. Appel said this year, the water star grass grew so thick they could not get their floating harvesters in to control it.
“The plant is able to get hold earlier in the season. It doesn’t have as much flow, and so it takes off,” Appel said. "The more root mass you have year after year with the drought, then the more plant biomass you have."
Blodgett, with the Yakama Nation Fisheries, said the plant starves the river of oxygen and creates a toxic environment for salmon, covering up the gravel that they need to dig their nests.
“It’s actually displaced a lot of the fall chinook spawning that used to occur in this area,” Blodgett said.
From the air, it was hard to see most of the drought’s impacts. On the ground, it was easier.
Fallow fields
Brad Haberman, a fourth-generation hay grower and processor in Ellensburg, invited me to pile into his truck and see how the drought is transforming his nearly 3,000-acre farm.
“This is what happens when you turn the water off,” Haberman said as he pointed to a parched hay field that had turned completely yellow in the dry heat. It looked almost like someone had spread out bales of hay on the ground.
There are many demands on the Yakima River. And not everyone has equal access to the water.
The state divides water rights holders into three classes based on how long ago they staked their claim: senior, prorateable and junior. Senior rights holders still get their full water allotment during most droughts. Prorateable and junior holders do not.
Most of Haberman’s farm is on a canal system with prorateable water rights, meaning when the water gets low, he gets cut off.
He got a first harvest off of this field, but then had to let it go. In total, his farm had stopped growing hay on 300 acres of his land, but is still making payments on 200 of them.
“We're still buying. And we're paying $260 an acre for it to sit barren like this,” Haberman said.
Haberman’s grandfather started this farm with 300 acres. Over the years, the following generations bought neighboring properties to build it up. Haberman and his brother are planning to hand it off to two of their sons. But the drought has already forced them to sell some of the land to help them make their land payments.
“If it keeps up, we’ll probably have to sell some more ground somewhere,” he said.
Haberman sold 80 acres to a neighbor who runs cattle on it, a scenario he said is becoming increasingly rare. He pointed to some new houses standing alongside the fields.
“That’s what’s going on here. You’re starting to see houses going up where this used to be all just pasture,” Haberman said.
He wants to see farmland stay farmland. But the odds are tough, as people move up from California or western Washington looking for property where they can build housing.
“It hurts us too, because it increases the value of property, which increases our taxes — our property taxes,” Haberman said. “So on paper, we looked really good. And we're cash poor.”
Haberman said some farmers are going out of business because of the prolonged drought; he has already seen a couple of bankruptcies.
Farming in drought
Across town, standing on a hillside between rows of apple trees, Harold Austin agreed that the last four years have been difficult. He has also seen farmers going out of business.
Austin is the director of Orchard Administration at the Zirkle Fruit Company, which farms about 1,400 acres in the Kittitas Valley.
“This is one of the original blocks of Honeycrisp that we grafted,” Austin said, pointing to a row of trees full of fruit. Twenty five years ago, the company was among the first in the valley to bring in Honeycrisp apples, grafting them onto mature Red Delicious trees to get them to market as quickly as possible. Over the years, Zirkle has invested millions of dollars in the infrastructure needed to grow a wide variety of fruit crops, Austin said.
On this hot August afternoon, a fogging system was keeping the stout rows of Honeycrisp from getting sunburnt.
“We cool the skin temperature so that it doesn't heat the core temperature of the fruit up, and that helps preserve the quality and condition of the apples,” Austin said. The fine mist is an efficient way to keep the apples cool while they grow and get ripe. But Austin said this year, they only have enough water from the Yakima to cool some of their acres. They were expecting it to be cut off by the end of September.
“If we don't have the water once the canals go dry, our crops are definitely at risk. The crop we've got hanging on the tree right now is probably somewhere between $23 [million] to $25 million in value,” Austin said.
If the water gets cut off, they could lose that fruit. “If it gets sunburned and destroyed by the heat to where it’s not marketable, then it’s just going to fall on the ground,” he said.
The Zirkle Fruit Company has six emergency wells on their property, which they have used to get through the last three years of drought. But to use the wells, they need permission from the state Department of Ecology, which is not guaranteed. Austin said this year, they had to invest tens of thousands of dollars in extra hydrology and engineering work to get their wells permitted.
As the water shortages have become more frequent and more severe, he said it is time for everyone in the basin to build more storage — reservoirs that could capture early winter rain and runoff to replace the missing snowpack — for the fish, farmers and communities in the Yakima River Valley.
Redirecting water
Smoke from a nearby wildfire hung thick in the air on a hot, late August afternoon near Cle Elum as a grain train slowed down along the shores of Lake Easton.
The drought is in full swing, but central Washington’s agricultural economy keeps chugging along. This reservoir, located in a state park, is part of the massive irrigation system that brings water to the Yakima Basin, one of the most productive farming areas in the country.
Urban Eberhart is the manager of the Kittitas Reclamation District, which provides irrigation to nearly 60,000 acres of farm land in this part of the state.
“These cars are coming through, they pick up soft white wheat and then take it out to the ports. And then they end up in a lot of the Asian markets for pastries,” he said. “It's a huge part of the state’s, the region’s, and the world economy — and the food supply for the world. ”
Much of that agriculture is made possible by water from the Yakima River. Eberhart took me to the dam at one end of Lake Easton, from which the river flows.
Peering down over the spillway, he said this location high up in the valley allows them to send water through 330 miles of gravity-fed canals and channels, delivering it all around the basin.
This dam was originally built in the 1920s for irrigation, but is now used to help fish as well.
“It has a history since the ‘80s of being used to help with fisheries issues, and then through the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan, we've actually expanded that program where this canal is actually being operated for farms and for fish,” Eberhart said.
A court decision in 1981 led water managers to use the system for an annual “flip flop” of flows that ensures there is enough water for both fish and irrigation.
Another more recent example, Eberhart said, is how they use the canal system to “borrow” water to keep local salmon streams from drying up in the summer.
“They normally would have sent it just down the river, straight down the river,” he said. "We're saying, ‘Gee, can we have it for a little while? We'll just put it in our canal. We'll put it right here, and it'll go right back to the river, and it'll provide these benefits.'"
Water storage in a warming world
This year’s drought came despite a wet winter with slightly more precipitation than normal. But, with warmer temperatures exacerbated by climate change, it fell as rain rather than snow, leaving the state with about half its normal snowpack. That snowpack normally stores about 60% of the water supply and gradually delivers it to the basin as snowmelt over the summer months.
Recently, warmer winter temperatures have decimated the summer water supply that comes from the snowpack.
Eberhart said the region needs more creative strategies for conserving, sharing and storing water to ensure the survival of farms and fish as they face more years like this one.
“Without melting snowpack, the full dependency is upon the reservoirs,” he said. "Our reservoirs, when they're all full, hold about 1 million acre feet of water, and we used to get about 1.5 million acre feet of snowpack water supply as it melted."
Everyone I spoke with in the basin agreed: They need more reservoirs.
“In December, we had an immense amount of rain and precipitation, and we physically cannot store it,” said Arden Thomas, the water resources manager for Kittitas County. “So, if it's not stored in the snow, it's not available in the summer when the needs are the highest.”
A water emergency
Thomas was alarmed a year ago, in early October, when the state took the unprecedented step of curtailing all surface water use — meaning no water could be taken from rivers, streams, or lakes in the Yakima Basin. It applied to everyone, even small cities.
“For the first time ever, these communities — and this included City of Yakima, City of Roslyn, South Cle Elum, and Cle Elum, received curtailment notices; they did not have a legal right to divert water for their citizens,” Thomas said.
The basin’s five reservoirs had dropped to an all-time low — to just 8% of their capacity — and the state said they were on the verge of running dry. So for 25 days, the more than 1,500 water rights holders had to cut back.
The curtailment affected almost everything: water for homes, schools, irrigation, construction and road crews. They had less than a week to prepare.
Some cities in the basin drew on well water. But they all came together to issue a joint statement voicing their concern.
“There was broad recognition that this was serious and scary, and that you didn't have to be told to cut water use to come in and cut water use and try and help each other out,” Thomas said.
Joining together
Ellensburg was among the cities that pitched in. Rebecca Springer, that community’s water resources manager, said even though they had well water, they wanted to do anything they could to support the entire Yakima Basin.
“We're all in this basin together and in this drought together, and so we did,” Springer said. “We were very pleased at the response when we reached out to Central Washington University and the districts to stop irrigating anywhere that was not required to be irrigated for safety,” Springer said.
Because of these measures, they were able to keep using water indoors, though they did ask residents to voluntarily cut back.
Springer said newer conservation measures include the city’s “Let Your Lawn Go Blonde” campaign, launched this June. It aims to reduce peak summer water demand in Ellensburg by 10%.
“So certainly, we adjust as we learn more, and as we're learning what the trends are looking like, we're adjusting as quickly as we can,” she said.
Springer said the emergency last fall has lent new urgency to water storage projects already underway. Ellensburg is looking at an underground solution — an “aquifer storage and recovery" project — in which the city would take water from the Yakima River when there was lower demand and inject it into a deep well.
“The water would reside there until we were in our summer months or the higher demand period, and then we could utilize some of that stored water,” Springer said.
There are years to go until Ellensburg’s well storage could work; they are still working on a feasibility study. But more than half a dozen of these underground water storage projects are currently planned for the basin. Two are already online.
Work is also underway to store more water in the Cle Elum Lake reservoir, by raising its level by 3 feet. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates it will be done in 2028.
The next big storage reservoir likely to be built in the basin is on a 3,600-acre property called Springwood Ranch. Located on the Yakima River in a deep canyon between Thorp and Cle Elum, it was acquired in 2024 through the work of the integrated plan.
Urban Eberhart, the manager of the Kittitas Reclamation District, drove us onto the site along dusty dirt roads. In the valley ahead, a big drilling rig was taking core samples from the landscape for a feasibility study. The project team did about $7.5 million worth of drilling this summer. Eberhart said they hope to store as much as 100,000 acre feet of water here.
The new Springwood reservoir could funnel water from the Yakima in winter, when the river is often overflowing. And it would use the canals that Eberhart's irrigation district operates.
“We can pull maybe up to 1,300 cubic feet per second of water in an atmospheric river event that's causing flooding out of the Yakima River, carry it over here, and place it at this location with gravity flow,” Eberhart said.
It will take at least a decade until this reservoir is built and can add to the resilience of the Yakima Basin as it deals with increasingly intense water shortages driven by climate change.
The costs so far are more than $30 million for the land and more than $20 million for the feasibility study. And there is no estimate yet for final construction costs because the team is still figuring out exactly what they can build.
But Eberhardt said working on these projects makes him proud, dreaming up ideas to solve problems in the face of ongoing drought, using relationships cultivated through the basin’s integrated plan.
