As communities downstream of Detroit Lake prepare for horrific dam drawdowns, I want to share some perspective with my old neighbors based on my work as a city administrator in Linn County when this whole process began in 2023. I recently read a quote Rep. Ed Diehl provided to the Statesmen Journal about the topic, addressing court orders for the US Army Corps of Engineers to drain reservoirs:
“I feel better than I did when this was originally proposed,” state Rep. Ed Diehl, R-Stayton, said. “I feel like they’ve learned from what happened at Green Peter and are handling this better. But I still have a lot of concerns because that filtration system is so delicate and if they have to shut it down, there’s no backup for Stayton.”
During the 2023-2024 drawdown season, I was the City Administrator/Recorder of Sodaville, a town south of the South Santiam River that was painfully affected by the Green Peter and Foster dam drawdowns. Sodaville’s water comes from fissures rather than aquifers, and water availability is highly dependent on the regional water table. Every fall for a few decades, the fissures provide less far water than normal and the City has to truck water into town that was purchased from Lebanon. While we did some excellent work building infrastructure that resulted in better conservation in 2022, the dam drawdowns during the 2023-2024 winter season resulted in such a collapse in the water supply that it decimated the City’s budget…