Heron Lake will rise again...

It seemed to me that the Corps and Bureau websites show that there isn't too much or anything left for the contractors to take.


SJ-C (San Juan-Chama) water taken out from Heron Lake, 2010, acre feet
28 April
458 May
238 June
0 July
31,899 August
45,008 September
0 October
77,522 total af of SJ-C water withdrawn through October.

The Heron Lake level was 7158.59' with 256,935 SJ-C acre feet and 257,313 total acre-feet remaining at the end of October 2010.

7,154.31' is the current Heron Level with 238,102 acre feet as of December 13, 2010, 2200 (10 pm) implies that roughly another 18,000 or so acre feet have been taken out during November and December.

This would account for almost all of the annual water available to contractors of 96,200 acre feet per annual water season. Heron has gone up several inches and more than a thousand acre feet in the past three days.

The implication is that SJ-C water is no longer being taken out and the marina should be safe through the winter.


http://www.usbr.gov/uc/albuq/water/SanJuanChama/Reservoirs/rpts/heron_storage.html


http://www.spa.usace.army.mil/wcscripts/lcud.pl

By the way, I did get to sail last Saturday at Elephant Butte Lake in between presiding over my last RGSC board meeting and the year-end party. At the White Elephant (White Whale?) gift exchange, Carol Anne scored a bottle of good rum ... aaaarrr, matey!

More water details.
As of the end of October, when about 80% of the available water for the year had been removed from Heron, here is how what each contractor removed compared with their total allocation. If some contractors removed more during the season than they were entitled to, it presumably means they bought some water from another contractor.

Taken Total Contractor
0 20900 Middle Rio Grande Conservancy
5730 5230 City of Santa Fe
0 375 County of Santa Fe
8648 5000 Cochiti Lake
48200 48200 City of Albuquerque
708 1030 Pojoaque Unit
0 400 Taos
0 1200 Los Alamos
150 1000 Espanola
0 15 Twining
0 400 Los Lunas
0 400 Bernalillo
0 500 Belen
0 60 Red River
0 6500 Jicarilla Apache
0 2000 San Juan Pueblo
0 2990 uncontracted
77,250 taken as of end of October; 96,200 total is what is available for the contractors during each water year.

Note that the numbers don't add up right; the total of what is shown as taken out from each contractor (63,256) was about 14,000 acre-feet short of the 77,250 total as of the end of October. Most of this is likely Middle Rio Grande Water that hasn't been put in the tally yet as being drawn by MRGCD.

For more details, see

http://www.usbr.gov/uc/albuq/water/SanJuanChama/Reservoirs/rpts/heron_release.html