{"id":94644,"date":"2019-04-12T20:08:02","date_gmt":"2019-04-13T02:08:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/almost-at-capacity-lake-nighthorse-will-wait-to-pump-from-river\/"},"modified":"2019-04-12T20:08:02","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T02:08:02","slug":"almost-at-capacity-lake-nighthorse-will-wait-to-pump-from-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/almost-at-capacity-lake-nighthorse-will-wait-to-pump-from-river\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost at capacity, Lake Nighthorse will wait to pump from river"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Despite
Despite extreme drought in Southwest Colorado during the past year, Lake Nighthorse has not seen a serious depletion of its water storage.<\/span>Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Lake Nighthorse is sitting pretty in terms of the amount of water stored in the reservoir just outside Durango, according to water managers.<\/p>\n

Despite the extreme drought<\/a> that plagued Southwest Colorado from fall 2017 to fall 2018, Lake Nighthorse never had a serious depletion of water storage and, in all likelihood, was one of the most full reservoirs in Colorado.<\/p>\n

According to Bureau of Reclamation data, the 120,000 acre-foot reservoir is at nearly 95% capacity. For reference, other area reservoirs, such as Vallecito and Lemon, are at 26% and 20% capacity, respectively.<\/p>\n

Russ Howard, manager of the Animas-La Plata Operations and Maintenance Association, which manages Lake Nighthorse, said snowmelt from Basin Creek, the drainage where the reservoir sits, replenished the lake with nearly 2,000 acre-feet of water.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, we need less than a foot of water to top off the reservoir,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

As a result, Howard said water managers don\u2019t need to pump as much water out of the Animas River to refill the reservoir.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to pump near as long as we normally do,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe only two or three weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

But pumping is not likely to happen anytime soon, as water quality is currently compromised by runoff from the 416 Fire burn scar into Hermosa Creek, a tributary of the Animas River.<\/p>\n

\u201cCharcoal. Ash. You see it all right now, and it\u2019s not pretty,\u201d Howard said. \u201cWe take the water quality of Lake Nighthorse very seriously \u2026 so we\u2019ll probably wait until later in the season to actually pump to allow for water quality to improve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Howard said it\u2019s important to run the pumping plant every year, just to make sure the equipment is operating as expected. He said he\u2019s still working out a contract with Western Area Power Administration for the cost of pumping this year.<\/p>\n

Lake Nighthorse loses about 2,700 acre-feet to evaporation every year, Howard said. But because of the runoff from Basin Creek, which rarely contributes a significant amount of water to the reservoir, that amount has already almost been made up.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a good year,\u201d Howard said.<\/p>\n

jromeo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Managers say water quality affected by burn scar runoff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":94645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[2838,2794,2216,295,294],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-94644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-416-fire","tag-animas-la-plata-project","tag-lake-nighthorse","tag-water","tag-water-supply"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94644"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=94644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}