Operators reduced flooding in face of record-breaking year

As the sun sets on the runoff season, we have plenty of new entries for the record books.

One of the most impressive: The flows in the Colorado River above Lake Granby from April through July produced 429,000 acre feet, far surpassing the previous all-time record from 1984, which was 355,000 acre feet.

Lake Granby spillway releases on June 22

Although it's been a great year for rebuilding our reserves, we aren't always thinking about C-BT solely in terms of storage. We also know that huge runoff numbers raise huge concerns for people who live downstream of Lake Granby.

Although C-BT is not a flood control project, we were able to operate it this year in a way that prevented damaging flows. The pre-emptive releases operators made kept the releases downstream at or below about 2,300 cfs. If we hadn't tweaked operations to create these sustained lower flows, the downstream channel would have at times quickly risen to about 3,900 cfs.

For more details on how Northern Water and Reclamation worked together to reduce flooding, read the recent Sky-Hi Daily News guest column by Northern Water General Manager Eric Wilkinson.

You won't see too many entries to this online update for a while, but as always, we're keeping an eye on what to expect during the next runoff season. Given the bounty of this year's snowpack, we can tell you that we don't expect it to be a low-flow kind of year ...