Water Resources in East Jefferson
Why are we paying attention to our water right now? While the snowpack fluctuates from year to year, this graphic from a March 6, 2024 Seattle Times article shows the recent decline in the Olympic snowpack:
To understand the basics of our watershed, the following presentation was created in 2013 by the East Jefferson Watershed Council, an organization that no longer exists. This presentation explains the basics of a watershed and where water in East Jefferson County comes from this 2013 EJWC presentation. At a high level, the City of Port Townsend manages the city water supply, and Jefferson PUD provides water for certain areas of the county (see this map.)
Our Jefferson County PUD and Jefferson County also have several useful documents on water resources:
If you’re now curious on how bad our water situation can get, here’s a news story about 2014-2015, the winter without snow: https://www.nrdc.org/stories/year-without-snow
To get a little more technical, in 2017, the Washington State Department of Ecology prepared a summary of what happened in the “wet drought” of 2015. https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/publications/documents/1611001.pdf
We were lucky in 2015 because normal precipitation returned in the autumn, but with the effects of climate change coming, we need to be thinking now about our water supply and our water use in the future.
What we can be doing
Here are some helpful videos:
Technical Resources
And if you really want to get more technical on water resources, here’s a chance to geek-out on water. If you’ve read all of the above documents, you’ll be well-equipped to understand a lot of it:
For information and resources related to the 2015 Drought, see here.