By Evan Bush
The Seattle Times
Gov. Jay Inslee declared drought Monday for nearly half of Washington watersheds, as the mountain snowpack that churns through hydropower dams, irrigates our state’s orchards and provides for fish continues to dwindle well below normal.
Twenty days into May, “our statewide snowpack is the fourth-lowest it’s been over the past 30 years,” said Jeff Marti, the drought coordinator for the Washington Department of Ecology.
Winter left many areas of the state with lower-than-normal snowpack. A hot, dry spring quickly zapped much of the snow that did accumulate.
The water-shortage forecast is serious, Marti said, but not as dire as what played out in 2015, a year of historically low snowpack. That year, harmful algal blooms closed fisheries, salmon died en masse in too-warm streams and agricultural losses exceeded $633 million, according to a federal report billing 2015 as a possible glimpse of our climate future.
Still, this year every water basin in the state is below the 30-year median for snowpack, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Many in Central and Western Washington sit below 50%.
The governor declared drought for the Methow, Okanogan and Upper Yakima basins in April. He added 24 more watersheds this month. The state has 62 in total.
The Legislature committed about $2 million to drought relief last session, Marti said. The drought declaration allows affected public entities, like municipalities, tribes and water districts, to apply for emergency funding to stave off crop failures or aid municipal water systems.
Despite the state’s wet reputation, “we technically have a Mediterranean climate in Washington state, with wet winters and dry summers,” said Nick Bond, the state’s climatologist.
“We’re kind of adapted — both from a society point of view and ecosystem point of view, fish and all that — to the existence of snow in the mountains and melt in the late spring and early summer to get us through that dry period of the year,” he added.
Marti said he worried in particular about communities in Southwest Washington and on the Olympic Peninsula that depend on shallow wells or surface water.
“There are impressive deficits,” he said. “It’s been drier, much drier than last year.”
