By WaterWatch of Oregon Staff | Oct. 2, 2023 | Instream
After a decade-plus of advocacy to restore and protect flows in the Crooked River in Central Oregon, the long-awaited legal protection of flows released from Prineville Reservoir for downstream fish and wildlife has finally been approved.
The Crooked River in Central Oregon is one of Oregon’s crown jewels. Winding through farmlands, Smith Rock State Park, and miles of wilderness canyons, the river provides important habitat for fish and wildlife, including prized redband trout and imperiled steelhead. As with most rivers in Oregon, the Crooked also brings considerable economic vitality to the region.
Since completion of the Bowman Dam in 1961, most of the Crooked River’s flow has been controlled by releases from the federally-owned dam upstream of Prineville. Originally built to supply irrigation, Bowman Dam has minimal provisions to protect streamflows needed for fish.
But while about half of the 155,000 acre-feet of water stored behind the dam was claimed by irrigation, the remaining water was untapped — a rare occurrence in the West. River advocates fought for decades for a legal claim to this unallocated water, but it wasn’t until the passage of the Crooked River Collaborative Water Security and Jobs Act of 2014 — which WaterWatch helped negotiate, draft and secure — that fish gained formal access to nearly 80,000 acre-feet of water.
A key provision of the Act is a requirement that the Bureau of Reclamation store, release, and use water for downstream fish and wildlife “in accordance with Oregon state water law.” What this means is the Bureau had to ensure that fish water was legally protectable instream against other water right users.
Gaining instream protection was a two-step process. The Bureau needed to both transfer half of its irrigation storage water right to allow storage for downstream fish and wildlife, but also needed to procure a secondary water right to protect the water released from storage for fish instream.
In 2018, WaterWatch helped negotiate the Bureau’s new water storage right for the previously unallocated stored water behind Bowman Dam that provides, in a normal water year, for 68,000 acre-feet of the 155,000 acre-feet of water stored for downstream fish, and an additional 10,000 acre-feet for irrigation or fish and wildlife.
But while the storage right was resolved, the Bureau was slow to apply to the state for a secondary water right to protect released water instream against use by downstream irrigators in the reach between Bowman Dam and Lake Billy Chinook.
After pressures brought by the 2020 Biological Opinion for the Deschutes Basin Habitat Conservation Plan that required the Bureau to pursue a secondary water right for fish, as well as legal inquiries by Advocates for the West on behalf of WaterWatch, the Bureau finally applied for a water right in June 2021. In Sept. 2023, the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD) issued the secondary water right.
So from now into the future, all water released from Prineville Reservoir for fish will be protected for 72 miles from the reservoir to Lake Billy Chinook — a huge victory for the river!
And along with the critical milestone of obtaining legal protection for instream flows in the Crooked River, WaterWatch’s longstanding work to block new storage projects above Prineville Reservoir — including a large project that would have inundated a section of the Wild and Scenic North Fork Crooked — resulted in the applications being pulled.
With these proposed storage projects no longer a threat, the water at issue under these applications can now flow into Prineville Reservoir to meet the downstream fish flows protected by the Crooked River Act and the newly-minted state water right.
This article originally appeared in the fall 2023 issue of WaterWatch of Oregon’s Instream newsletter. Banner photo of the Crooked River by Bob Wick / Bureau of Land Management.
