In peak drought conditions Piute Reservoir is nearly empty and the entire Sevier River system has fallen into the single digits.
As of September 15 Piute Reservoir read at 1% of capacity, Otter Creek was at 9%, and Yuba at 2%.
Piute Reservoir is located north of Junction, in Piute County. The reservoir was built off the fork of the Sevier River in 1908 for irrigation purposes and like other reservoirs in the system, relies largely on runoff from precipitation to stay full.
While the reservoir is in Piute County and shares a name with the county, the reservoir’s water isn’t actually owned by Piute County. Mckay Morgan, an owner of Morgan Ranches in Circleville Utah, states, “The Cox decree set up water rights with the Piute Reservoir being owned by Delta and Sevier irrigation.”
The Cox Decree is a 232-page court decision issued by Judge LeRoy H. Cox in Sevier County in 1936. As a result of a water rights lawsuit there and with the threat of more lawsuits along the Sevier River, the Cox Decree allocated practically every drop of water along the entire system, including the Sanpitch River in Sanpete Valley. It still stands today as the law of the Sevier River.
Since the vast majority of Piute Reservoir’s water is reserved for Delta and Sevier irrigation, the reservoir’s water is discharged to those counties’ irrigation companies.
But in our high-desert valleys, irrigation from the Sevier River upstream of the reservoir is critical. AgWeather, an online source of weather information for agriculture, states, “Yearly precipitation is 9 inches per year in Circleville. From May 1, 2020, to July 12, 2021, Circleville received 3.33 inches of precipitation.” This information not only shows that Circleville was in a drought, but Piute County as a whole received only a third of what the normal precipitation is.
It’s quite clear that Utah has been in a drought for years now, and Piute Reservoir has been hit deeply by this drought. Last month Deseret News showed that Piute Reservoir was 0.23% full. Piute farmers get some of their water from the Piute Reservoir, but if not, water from the Otter Creek Reservoir, located in Antimony Utah, supplies farmers. Trent Wilde from Circleville says, “The water is drained first from the Piute Reservoir because it doesn’t have as good fishery as the Otter Creek Reservoir.”
While the reservoir doesn’t have much impact on Piute County as a whole, since the farmers in the county use some of that water, they are affected. McKay Morgan goes on to say, “Farming has been impacted. It’s affecting the income and how much we make each year. Piute County gets water from Otter Creek, Sevier Creek and snow pack. The amount of water we get impacts our farming!”
There isn’t much the community can do to help preserve this reservoir since controlling how much water is in the reservoir can’t be decided by the community. Morgan states, “In my honest opinion there isn’t much the community can do. The most we can do is pray for more water.” Unfortunately, because the reservoir gains water by precipitation and we are in a drought year, we are left to hold on to the little water we have left and to use it wisely.
– by Ari Hurdsman (17) Junction
Feature image caption: Piute Reservoir is startlingly low this year. The reservoir is used as a first choice for water by many of the surrounding cities. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about low water right now except for pray and use it as fairly as we can. Courtesy Emily Sierra.
Ari Hurdsman – Junction
Ari Hurdsman is a junior journalist at the Byway. She just recently moved to Ephraim, Utah, where she is a freshman at Snow College. She enjoys writing about Piute sports, and she’s really good at it! In her free time, she enjoys singing, dancing, reading and hanging out with friends and family.