PHOENIX — Salt River Project (SRP) has activated its emergency operations center to keep everything flowing smoothly through Valley canals and rivers as Mother Nature continues to bring rain and snow to Arizona.
Water flow along the Verde and Salt rivers is increasing significantly as SRP ups the current water release from the reservoirs.
Jim Shea has lived in the Valley for 50 years and the sight of a dry riverbed full of water is something he has not seen in decades. “It’s fantastic it’s my third time down here this week because it’s just once in a lifetime,” said Shea, talking about the dam at Tempe Town Lake.
It's a sight to see as water rages through Tempe Town Lake, spilling over the dam and into the Salt River.
“We’ve only been here 17 years but still never seen anything like it,” said David Quisenberry.
According to SRP, a recent snow survey determined the snowpack is the deepest it has been in 30 years, and that is leading to significant watershed in our reservoirs.
“We are getting far more water into the reservoir system than we can hold,” said Charles Ester, manager of watershed for SRP.
The reservoirs were nearly 100% full and SRP has been releasing water slowly since March 2, but today it increased the release to 16,000 cubic feet per second which is about 120,000 gallons per second.
It is a process of gathering several SRP experts together to analyze runoff data, forecast models, and run simulations of what the water release will do.
“We actually call up the dam,” said Ester. "We have operators there on standby they double-check calculations and then make the changes and changes are made."
The water release analysis is done daily to keep everything flowing correctly.
“These are relativity small releases, even though you look at the Salt River and it appears dramatic. And right now we are not expecting to release anything larger than what we are doing now,” said Ester.
With the expected snowmelt, SRP will continue to do releases through the month of April.
