Collapse of irrigation tunnel may devastate 100,000 acres of farmland

By Tom Milstead, Torrington Telegram Via Wyoming News Exchange
Posted 7/25/19

When farmers in Goshen County went to bed on the night of July 16, night none of them could have guessed what they would wake up to the morning.

They likely went to bed with fields of healthy …

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Collapse of irrigation tunnel may devastate 100,000 acres of farmland

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When farmers in Goshen County went to bed on the night of July 16, none of them could have guessed what they would wake up to the morning.

They likely went to bed with fields of healthy crops and — considering that Wyoming isn’t facing a drought for the first time in recent memory — dreams of bountiful harvest. What those farmers woke to, however, was an agricultural nightmare.

Sometime around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, July 17, part of a 102-year-old irrigation tunnel collapsed, in a remote area south of Fort Laramie.

It caused a breach upstream that washed out part of the Fort Laramie-Gering irrigation canal, but the impact was even worse downstream. It brought irrigation to a swift halt. Around 110,000 acres of farmland in southeast Wyoming and western Nebraska that rely on the canal suddenly had no water source amid hot summer temperatures.

According to Goshen Irrigation District Supervisor Rob Posten, the numerous state agencies working on the collapse have come up with a temporary solution to help producers this season.

“They’re going to try to put a 10 1/2-foot pipe through the tunnel, so we can get it going,” Posten said. “They’re in the process of doing that.”

That plan could take up to three weeks to implement, and each day without water equates to more crops lost along the canal.

Gov. Mark Gordon visited the site Friday, July 19, and said the collapse is going to have an enormous negative impact on local farmers.

“You can see there are a lot of people and a lot of land that is affected,” Gordon said. “We’ve been working carefully with Nebraska and others to try to figure out the fastest way to solve this. We’re going to do our best to get water back to all of these farms.”

He called it “a big deal.”

“There are hundreds of thousands of acres and everybody has their crops in. We finally got some summer a few days ago, and now is when you need that water,” Gordon said. “This is going to be devastating. It really is.”

Gordon said he brought along some of the state’s best resources to help find a solution, from the Department of Agriculture to Homeland Security to a water specialist.

Goshen County Board of Commissioners Chairman Wally Wolski surveyed the site alongside Gordon and state senator Cheri Steinmetz.

“It will have the biggest impact on Goshen County anything has ever had,” Wolski said. “We’re going to do everything in our power and look at all of the options to see if we can get water back to the farmers.”

In the hours after the collapse, Goshen Irrigation District personnel shut off the water flow from Whalen Dam, and called on the Bureau of Reclamation office in Mills to shut off the flow from Guernsey Reservoir.

The district used large water pumps to pump out some 13 miles of canal upstream from collapse. That water had to be gone before the damage could even be assessed, according to Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson Jay Dallman.

Steinmetz said the tunnel collapse will likely be an issue for more than producers. She had talked with officials from Nebraska, who were worried that the loss of an irrigation source would result in a diminished sugar beet crop — which would temporarily shut down the Western Sugar processing facility in Scottsbluff.

“In talking with a Nebraska senator today, they are concerned that they won’t have enough sugar beets to run their factory if we don’t get any water to the crops,” she said. “The cascade effect through the business community, not only the agriculture community, will be catastrophic for all of our little communities along the North Platte River that are irrigated by this system.”

Steinmetz called the tunnel collapse “a catastrophic system failure.”

“It’s old infrastructure and it’s reminiscent of what is going on all across the state. ... Not just irrigation, but within our municipalities as well because our infrastructure is aging out,” she said of century-old systems. “It is imperative that the state prioritizes our spending because we take these systems for granted.”

The Goshen Irrigation District set up a Wednesday afternoon meeting in the Eastern Wyoming College auditorium in Torrington to discuss the collapse, the repair and the potential timeframe for repairing the tunnel with producers who rely on the tunnel. Steinmetz said there are a lot of people working on the problem, and their main goal is to get the water flowing.

“We have a group of problem solvers on the ground who have not given up on getting water to their crops this year,” she said.

“It’s what we do in Goshen County when we have a crisis,” she said. “We all come together and we’re problem solvers and we look for a solution.”

Gov. Mark Gordon officially declared the situation to be an emergency on Monday, allowing him to send state resources to Goshen County as needed. Goshen County commissioners made a similar declaration the same day.

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