BURLEY — Shoshone Falls will soon give one more show before going dry in August.
The Bureau of Reclamation is releasing water from dams on the Snake River above Shoshone Falls because heavy rains since Saturday maxed out the Upper Snake River system. The result will be 10,000 cubic feet per second of water over the falls for about a week, said Brian Stevens, a civil engineer with the bureau in Heyburn.
Several inches of rain fell since Saturday morning at Glade Creek (2.5 inches) and Snake River Station (2.1 inches), both above Jackson Lake in Wyoming, a bureau press release said. About 1.65 inches fell at Valley View, above Island Park.
That’s a big watershed,” Stevens said Tuesday. “Just a couple inches of rain means a lot of water.”
Jackson Lake and Palisades Reservoir are large lakes that were able to contain a lot of the runoff, he said.
“At 97 percent capacity, Palisades still had a lot of storage left.”
But Grassy Lake, Henrys Lake, Island Park, Ririe Reservoir and American Falls Reservoir are 100 percent of capacity, according to the bureau.
On Monday, the bureau planned to increase discharge from 16,200 cubic feet per second to 19,000 cfs at American Falls Dam, and from 14,900 cfs to 15,400 cfs at Minidoka Dam.
Closer to home, Milner Reservoir was 83 percent full as of Tuesday. The bureau increased discharge at Milner to 7,500 at noon and will increase it to 10,000 Wednesday, Stevens said.
The bureau looks about 10 days ahead to plan for flood control, he said. Most of the rain recently forecasted has fallen, but small pockets of rainfall continue.
