Water releases from Pine Flat Reservoir into the Kings River have been reduced as part of an ongoing plan to manage significant rain and snowmelt this year, according to the Kings River Water Association.
The water association originally anticipated that Mill Creek, the unregulated stream which usually carries small flows or none at all, was forecast to reach a peak discharge of 9,550 cubic feet per second to the Kings River. The peak was anticipated Tuesday night around midnight.
However, the water association now predicts the creek won’t reach anywhere near the previously forecast peak.
“This is a much lesser event than what we saw last Friday when Mill Creek peaked at 18,860 cubic feet per second. It’s probably the most that has ever been observed coming out of Mill Creek,” said Randy McFarland, public information consultant at the Kings River Water Association.
“Mill Creek at 3 p.m. this afternoon marked around 2,488, which is way below what the predicted peak was. It started today around 936, earlier it was as low as 86 before it started raining in the foothills,” said McFarland.
The water association states that with the assistance of other water agencies and the Corps of Engineers, it was successful last week in reducing the water releases from Pine Flat.
“The drain down started earlier and it was much more extreme, the result is that there shouldn’t really be any problems carrying this water through Kings County, “ said McFarland.
The water association is marking considerably bigger potential problems in the near future, saying that large amounts of water are expected to flow into the Kings River as the season continues.
At least one other agency is predicting that April through July peak season runoff to Pine Flat Reservoir is likely to be near or above all-time amounts, according to the association.
The reservoir still has more than one-fourth of its 1 million acre-foot capacity remaining.
“We have a huge snowpack remaining in the mountains and that’s going to melt this spring. So, Pine Flat is pretty high for this time of year, it's what we call encroached, and the level of storage is up to the level reserved for flood control,” said McFarland.
According to the water association, the control of water levels is crucial as temperatures warm up.
“The Core of Engineers will do everything they can to bring that down, it's really important that this happens because otherwise if the lake fills and it should, and there's a lot of water still up there, then that becomes a natural river. What comes into the reservoir will come out, because you really can’t store anything else,” said McFarland.
Something similar is happening to the Tule River in Porterville, which is connected to Success Lake which is currently full.
“They're bringing it down slowly, but it's still over capacity, so they essentially are letting out a little bit more water than is coming in, but there for quite a while it was the other way around. That water in the flood release that is not used for irrigation, or groundwater recharge, will end up in the Tulare Lake bed in Kings County,” said McFarland.
