A RETREATING RESERVOIR
Drought brings McConaughy to new low levels, hurting irrigation, migration and recreation.
ALGIS J. LAUKAITIS
Note: Snow melting in the Rocky Mountains feeds the Platte River. In the winter of 2005-06, snowfall was up from the previous five years, but the effect on the Platte of increased snowmelt wasn't known as this report went to press.
OGALLALA - Lake McConaughy is Nebraska's ocean.
When full, the lake stretches west for 22 miles from Kingsley Dam to where it meets the North Platte River, the source of most of its water.
The lake is 142 feet deep at its deepest point and has more than 100 miles of white, sandy beaches. Whitecaps and rock-pounding waves are common, as are sailboats and flocks of sea gulls.
"You can take all of the other lakes in the state and dump them in Lake McConaughy twice and still have room left over," said Tim Anderson, public relations manager for the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, which owns the lake.
That was before the drought, now in its seventh year.
More than half the lake is gone, dried up from irrigation releases, evaporation and too little rain. Most of the northern half is covered in brush and saplings. Boat docks lie marooned, some more than half a mile from the water.
In late summer, farm tractors and four-wheel drive vehicles pull boats in and out of the lake, and fishermen hike long distances to cast their lines.
It's not all bad, though. The low water levels are great for campers, who can park their RVs on white sand beaches. But miles and miles of beaches are not necessarily a welcome sight at Lake McConaughy, which is the source of water for hydroelectric power generation, irrigation and recreation.
Known to many as Big Mac, the lake is the state's largest reservoir. Most of its water comes from melting snows in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming. Irrigators in west-central Nebraska rely on its water to nourish thirsty crops in dry, hot summers. People from Nebraska and Colorado fish and boat in it.
The lake is also an environmental oasis for nesting birds and migrating eagles, which spend the winter snatching fish from the open waters below Kingsley Dam.
For Lake McConaughy, 2005 was a critical year.
Central said the reservoir hadn't been that low in the spring for more than 60 years. The lake was at 35 percent of its storage capacity of almost 2 million acre-feet of water. An acre-foot of water equals 325,851 gallons, enough to meet the water needs of an average household for a year.
Because McConaughy was so low, Central planned to ration water for the first time in its history. Instead of getting their full allocation of 18 inches of water, farmers and ranchers received 6.7 inches, said Jeremie Kerkman, a civil engineer supervisor for Central, which is based in Holdrege.
The Nebraska Public Power District, which stores about 125,000 acre-feet annually in the lake for its irrigators in central and western Nebraska, hopes to reduce releases in 2006.
"It all depends on the weather and river flows," said district spokeswoman Beth Boesch. She noted that NPPD used only about 40 percent of its water in 2004 and 38 percent in 2005 because most customers pump directly from the Platte River.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages an "environmental account" of about 106,000 acre-feet to provide water for four endangered or threatened species downstream in central and eastern Nebraska. In 2005, for the third year in a row, the federal agency declined to use its share and didn't release any water.
Sharon Whitmore, who manages the environmental account, said the drought was partly to blame. But she also said the agency studied how to get the most benefit from its future releases. Water has been released in the past to augment summertime flows in the Platte, but the agency has found that most of it never reached Grand Island because of seepage and groundwater pumping for irrigation.
"We were releasing so much water, we were seeing little benefit in the habitat areas," Whitmore said. "We found that you can hardly get the water there in the summer time."
Lake McConaughy is also critical for irrigators, who get water through an elaborate system of canals to irrigate their crops.
The reservoir was built during the 1940s for one purpose: provide water in times of drought. And it has done its job over the years.
But times have changed, and so has Lake McConaughy. It draws thousands of visitors, mostly from Colorado, and millions of tourist dollars. Reports of its distressed condition have kept people away in droves and have upset some business owners and long-time residents.
"If people hear that a lake's dry, they are going to go somewhere else," said Mitch Gerstenkorn, who supervises McConaughy for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.
Annual visits have dropped from 1 million to 650,000 people. That means business suffers and tempers flare. Some people blame Central and NPPD.
"They took a beautiful, majestic lake and turned it into a mud hole, and now they don't know how to fix the problem," said Ruth Clark, owner of Chere's Lounge in Lemoyne, on the north shore of the lake.
Clark said Central and NPPD officials oversold the water and should have "conserved a little" because of the drought. She also said more should be done to enhance recreational opportunities, thereby attracting more people.
"There's been no water for the past three years (on the west side of the lake)," she said. "How do you think these people feel? How do they expect to make a living?"
Anderson said people around McConaughy need to understand that every drop in the lake is spoken for. Under terms of legally binding contracts, he said, the water belongs to Central and NPPD and their irrigators, and to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Central provides irrigation water for about 113,000 acres downstream from Lake McConaughy. Anderson noted the district lost about $2.5 million in both 2003 and 2004 because it did not have enough water to generate hydroelectricity.
Speaking at a spring 2005 conference on the future of Nebraska's water supply, Rep. Tom Osborne (R-3rd District) called McConaughy "a vital economic engine for the area."
He said he was concerned about the lake's ability to bounce back after six years of drought. "How fast will this lake refill? Will it ever refill? This is a major concern," Osborne said.
Steve Smith, who irrigates farmland near Imperial, has come up with a unique and controversial proposal to ease the crisis: Sink 550 wells into the Ogallala Aquifer to fill Lake McConaughy and provide water to the Platte and Republican river basins. But government officials and environmentalists have feared the $265 million project would hurt the fragile Ogallala, one of the world's largest freshwater aquifers.
Central's Kerkman said it will take two or three years of good snow in Wyoming to fill up the lake. When the snow melts in the mountains, water flows downstream and fills up a handful of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reservoirs in Wyoming before flowing down the North Platte River and into McConaughy. Along the way, irrigators in Nebraska's Panhandle region draw on the water to irrigate crops.
Kerkman said Wyoming's reservoirs will have to be filled up before any water trickles down to Big Mac.
"They have 2.8 million acre-feet of (reservoir) space and about 1 million acre-feet of water," he said.
Even in its drought-depleted condition, McConaughy dwarfs any other reservoir in Nebraska, Kerkman said.
"(It's not) a little puddle left on the prairie."
