Aging irrigation infrastructure to be discussed in Worland

WORLAND — It wasn’t a secret to Wyoming’s agriculture community that thousands of tunnels, ditches and canals were creeping up in age — the majority exceeding being older than a century or more — but the 2019 tunnel collapse in Goshen County that left thousands without irrigation during the most critical part of the growing season served as a wakeup call.

That’s the impetus for numerous meetings being held statewide to assess producers’ thoughts on aging critical irrigation infrastructure.

On July 17, 2019, heavy rains and resulting flooding caused a tunnel in the Gering-Ft. Laramie Irrigation District to collapse. Roughly 107,000 acres of farmland in Wyoming and the Nebraska Panhandle were cut off from water at the most critical time of the growing season.

Now, the Wyoming Water Development Commission has been tasked with getting input from the more than 100 irrigation districts in Wyoming. To achieve that, the commission has held meetings in towns throughout the state.

“It got a lot of people thinking,” Wyoming Water Development Office Manager Chase Tavelli said. “Everybody has known that structures are aging, but when you have major failures that cut off thousands of acres, it becomes more real.”

A meeting in Worland is scheduled tonight (Thursday) from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Worland Community Center Complex Washakie Room.

Tavelli said most structures supporting Wyoming’s irrigation systems are in excess of 100 years old. Following the collapse of the tunnel in southeastern Wyoming, critical aging infrastructure has become a major topic in the state. In recent years, the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Agriculture Committee tasked the water commission with looking into the issue more in depth.

“We got funding at the beginning this year,” Tavelli said. We hired our consultant (Laramie based Trihydro) and we’ve been running with it ever since.”

So far, the water commission and Trihydro are still collecting data from agriculture producers. Meetings held in Laramie, Pinedale, Saratoga and Casper have yielded turnouts in the dozens.

Tavelli said he expects a similar, if not bigger, turnout in Worland.

“We have to rely heavily on the users,” Tavelli said. “We can’t look at every structure in the state. There’s thousands. That’s the impetus for contacting all these entities: Get their input and have them populate the database that’s being constructed right now.

“One of the things we preach at our meetings is that we need your input. It’s been a really fun project so far. We’ve received a lot of input and good questions.”

During the meetings, attendees can expect representative from the commission to discuss the project and traditional and non-traditional funding opportunities. The US Bureau of Reclamation will also give a recorded presentation focused on its WaterSmart program.

Tavelli said the commission has already sent surveys to the state’s irrigation districts. So far, there’s been about a 50% response rate.

“We’re collecting information at these meetings to build a big database, put some numbers to things and see how they start to rank out as we try to identify structures that are of the most concern,” Tavelli said. “We don’t know how that’s going to sort out yet. We’re working on that all the time. We want to find out what’s critical. We’ll be getting very serious about this.

“We’re getting input from attendees on what is most critical to them.”