04/07/05 Choices for Black Rock, Part two

It can be easy for someone connected to the issue of water storage in the Yakima River Basin of Washington, or water related issues in general, to get caught up with the exciting prospects of the proposed Black Rock water storage reservoir. After all, it would be the most dramatic project of its kind & the construction of a dam to hold water not from a flowing stream, but pumped miles away from the Columbia River. The facility would hold water to help irrigators, while allowing more water to remain in the Yakima River and its tributaries for fish recovery efforts. And then there is the size of the project&which at its grandest scope&would feature a dam higher and wider than Grand Coulee Dam. Pretty heady stuff indeed. But Kim McCartney of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Yakima office says there are some things to consider. MCCARTNEY: There's a lot of work we need to do yet, some economic benefit analysis, social, cultural resource analysis, and develop the benefits for the alternative itself. When it comes to the economics of the large scale version of Black Rock, it is not the economic benefits that are questioned, it is the projected costs. One estimate had the full scale version & with the large dam, pumping stations, perhaps a small power generator & at roughly $4 billion dollars. And McCartney adds that one should also keep in mind that Black Rock is not the only option being considered for increased water storage in the Yakima. It is competing with other ideas that are already several decades old. MCCARTNEY: Those include enlarging Bumping Lake, creating a new dam on Lmuma Creek between Ellensburg and Yakima near the Yakima River, and then also a pipeline between Keechelus and Kachess Reservoirs. Those alternatives need to be updated. The last time they were looked at was about twenty years ago. We will update those costs, and then look at the impacts they have on the fishery and then the irrigation water supply in the Basin. And then we'll compare them to the Black Rock alternative also. The goal is to complete the benefit analysis of all options by next spring, and determine which then move to the feasibility study level. MCCARTNEY: The schedule to complete the feasibility study and the environmental impact statement is the end of 2008. So there seems like there's a lot of time left to do that, and seems like it's going to take a lot of time but there's a lot of analysis's we need to do, a lot of data we need to gather, and there's just a lot of work to do in those three and half years we have left.