Experts expect drought conditions to worsen in northwest Montana

Drought disaster declarations notwithstanding, local officials are not currently considering water use restrictions.

Officials state there are no government imposed drought restrictions on water use outside of availability and seniority of water rights. Nearby, however, tribal entities recently paused all outside water use.

Lincoln County was designated on July 31 as a primary county for drought disaster relief by U.S Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak.

For the City of Libby, the city reservoir is still in good shape despite the drought, Libby City Administrator Samuel Sikes said.

"If it came down to it, the mayor and council would have the discussion of drought and water conservation to provide guidance to our water customers," he said.

Part of the reason northwest Montana is so dry is snow accumulation throughout last winter, said Zachary Hoylman, assistant state climatologist for the Montana Climate Office.

"The northern areas in Montana were left high and dry," he said.

Looking at the watershed for the Middle Fork of the Flathead, snow accumulation was sitting somewhere in the 20th percentile, 70% of normal, he said.

While a low snowpack was shared across the northwest this year, there was also a very early melting period this spring.

"Temperatures you would expect to see in July we were seeing all the way back in May, right around May 1, and that persisted for a couple of days," Hoylman said.

The snowpack melted quickly, which is not good for water system recharge and this coupled with below-normal precipitation for northwest counties, has led to the current situation, Hoylman said. Evaporation that happens when warm weather combines with wind can make conditions drier faster, he said.

"A lot of the atmospheric rivers that were coming out of California and the Pacific Coast just kinda missed the northwest and hit other parts of the state quite a lot," Hoylman said.

Even with respect to the last 30 years and longer trends in climate, this summer has been warm for northwest Montana, Hoylman said.

The one-month outlook for temperatures in August will be warmer than average. Some rain in early August helped cool things for a short while, but he would expect to see the continued drying of northwest Montana.

"I think most people in northwest Montana, most of the practitioners and planners that I work with in the drought space, are expecting to see conditions continue to deteriorate in the northwest," Hoylman said.

The National Weather Service is forecasting high temperatures of 103 to 104 degrees through Thursday, leading it to issues a heat advisory.

In general, the Climate Office has been seeing changes to the state's precipitation and temperature and it's been clear there's a warming trend. It's hard to attribute any specific event to climate change, but it's clear there are long-term shifts, Hoylman said.

"One thing we have seen across a large portion of the west and portions of Montana is an increase in variability associated with climate change," Hoylman said. "By having an increase in variability, what that means is that we're seeing a higher likelihood of much below average precipitation and increased probability of much above average precipitation."

It's been a dry July, and what happens this fall is "anybody's guess," said Mike Downey, the water resource planner for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.

"We're now seeing those flows in our rivers as a result of our snowpack coming off so early and so quickly this year and really it was a diminished snowpack," Downey said.

According to reporting in the Daily Inter Lake, the streamflow on the Fisher River just above where it flows into the Kootenai River north of Libby was about half the typical rate, as well.

According to the National Weather Service’s Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service, the Fisher was flowing at 2.73 feet on the evening of Sunday, Aug. 13. Its low water record is 2.37 feet, set on Jan. 2, 1977.

Downey said this year was somewhat unusual, as some parts of Montana didn't have an average high-elevation snowpack, but cold weather in March and April let the mountains hold onto a decent mid-elevation snowpack. Downey said he could see how the drought came as a surprise, at least to people outside the northwest.

"This was many months in the making," he said.

Meanwhile, stage 2 fire restrictions were enacted by government entities across northwest Montana on Aug. 5. Agricultural operations are exempted from restrictions if they adhere to the required fire mitigation efforts – on-hand fire extinguishers or backpack water pumps.

Anna Pakenham Stevenson, water resources division administrator for the DNRC, said the state of Montana manages the administration of water rights through the DNRC. However, the state does not have broad authority over water distribution or conservation.

In Montana, local entities make water conservation decisions and Montana has not faced a drought so prolonged or intense as to require statewide emergency conservation measures, Stevenson said.

"In the event of severe droughts like in 2017, the state of Montana did make some public service announcements on drought. Because drought affects different water use sectors and geographic areas so differently, PSAs are usually generated at the local level to address specific impacts in the area," she wrote in a recent email.

The drought disaster declaration made by the USDA has no impact on the application of water rights in Flathead or any other county in Montana, she said. However, the USDA's disaster declaration does release drought relief funding to local producers through programs that the Farm Services Administration administers.

She said that the disaster declaration resulted from consultations among state and federal agencies, conditions identified by the U.S. Drought Monitor, Disaster and Emergency Services and the governor's office.

As such, drought impacts on irrigators in Lincoln County will depend on their specific water source.

"Irrigators are limited by both the reliability of their water supply and the seniority of their water rights," she said.

While no local government in Lincoln County has enacted water use restrictions yet, on the nearby Flathead Reservation, the Salish Kootenai Housing Authority implemented watering restrictions for all customers within specific community water systems. The restrictions began in early August.

According to the authority, the priority is to ensure that all customers have access to safe drinking water and violators may be disconnected from their water supply.

"With the unprecedented hot and dry summer we have been experiencing, we have seen fluctuations in our tank levels and in some of the well depths. To prevent loss of water to any of our customers within our water systems these restrictions need to be placed," the release stated.