Now that the weather is warming up that means the spring run-off will begin soon and officials are excited to see where we are water wise this year now that winter is over. Castle Country Radio had the opportunity to speak over the telephone with Utah Division of Water Resources Drought Coordinator, Laura Haskell to get all the details.

“It has been record-breaking, its great news, after depleting all of our reservoirs and our water resources for two years, we’re happy to have this water, and lots of water. Statewide we exceeded all records of snowpack. We exceeded kind of the modern records, but where we have equipment and when they went out and manually checked the snowpack, we’ve exceeded that as well,” said Haskell. This year there is more water in the snowpack which means we could very well replenish our reservoirs this year.

Officials are hoping that the spring run-off will be a gradual process this year. “The ideal situation for it to melt would be to kind of melt a little bit, then cool off, melt a little bit, and cool off. That would be the ideal we are hoping for. Scofield is currently at about 28 percent of capacity, usually its about 42 percent this time of year and the models that we’re looking at are predicting that we’ll completely fill Scofield this year,” stated Haskell. Because we had been facing drought like conditions the last few years, we thought that it would take years to replenish the reservoirs but this winter has been very generous.

Although we are hopeful that we will have more than enough water this year, its still very important to practice water conservation because we don’t know what we will face in the years to come. “We are one of the driest states in the nation, and if we hadn’t had those reservoirs the last couple of years, we would have been in a much worse situation than we were. We used all that stored water so we want to keep that water stored there, so if we have another bad winter or a really hot summer, it’s there for us,” said Haskell. That’s why it so important to now make conscience efforts to save water in order to plan for the future.

We now have the water that is needed to get us through the summer months so if you would like to make changes to one’s garden or landscaping this is the time to do it. “Because it’s been so wet, if you’re kind of thinking about, hey, maybe I want to change out an area, I don’t really use this grass, I would like to put in some nice plants with a drip, this would be a great year to do it. Because you do have the water to start those new plants, you do have the water to have nice wet ground for those new plants that you’re planting,” said Haskell.

For more information and details about water conservation visit the Division of Water Resources website at https://water.utah.gov/