Washington is once more under a drought emergency, state officials announced Tuesday, marking the third such declaration in as many years and underscoring the damage wrought by year-after-year droughts.
Typically the start of April marks the peak of Washington’s snowpack season, but west of the Cascades and Central Washington are lagging behind, spelling trouble for the year ahead.
State officials are already concerned for water supply and hydropower production. Farmers are planning for another year of water restrictions, an early end to their growing seasons and perhaps the loss of entire harvests.
Utilities in Seattle, Tacoma and Everett say they have enough water in reserves to make restrictions unlikely this summer, but other areas across the state aren’t as lucky.
For now, all of Kittitas and Yakima counties and a portion of Benton County are considered to be under drought emergency, Casey Sixkiller, head of Washington’s Department of Ecology, said in a news conference. That declaration unlocks $4.5 million in emergency relief for communities, businesses and people in those areas.
Fourteen other watersheds in Chelan, King, Okanogan, Pierce, Skagit, Snohomish and Whatcom counties are under a drought advisory and their conditions could worsen in the weeks ahead.
Sure, there’s irony in speaking about drought and lousy snowpack with rain in the forecast this week, Sixkiller said.
But the scale of these things matters. A couple of misty days west of the Cascades, bringing maybe a few tenths of an inch of rain, aren’t enough.
“Even if April is another soggy month, we still won’t catch up,” Sixkiller said.
Not only is this the first three-year drought since the state’s emergency relief framework began in 1989, but also six of the past 10 years in Washington brought some form of drought. This follows the worsening effect of climate change brought on by humans burning fossil fuels, including oil, coal and natural gas. Record global temperatures have been registered in recent years.
Much of Washington’s water supply relies on snowpack accumulating over the winter and melting into summer when precipitation dries up. Drinking water, agriculture, hydropower and our environment depend on this balance.
Droughts here can take on a variety of “flavors,” said Karin Bumbaco, deputy state climatologist. In 2023, the state saw a decent snowpack only for it to largely melt off early during a rash of extreme heat in May. With reservoirs already full, that melted snow had no place to go but out into Puget Sound.
In 2024, warm winter temps led to poor snowpack accumulation. And this year, snowpack struggled across much of the state, lagging especially in the Puget Sound and North Cascades region, falling onto drier-than-normal soils from the year before, compounding the damage.
Washington can expect a type of “snow drought” four years in every decade, said Caroline Mellor, Ecology’s statewide drought lead.
Climate change is rewriting the rules for Washington’s water, Sixkiller said. This new paradigm will mean more rain, less snowpack, earlier springs and harder, drier summers.
“This is the new normal,” he said.
While Seattle Public Utilities has its own reservoirs system and appears to be in decent shape, the diminishing snowpack has hit Seattle City Light particularly hard, burning up cash reserves and leading to a rate increase, which doesn’t appear likely to go away soon.
Reservoirs in the Yakima River Basin sit at about 59% of their normal storage levels, Sixkiller said, the fifth-lowest level recorded since 1971.
Farmers depending on that water are bracing for a dry year. Scott Revell, who manages the Roza Irrigation District within the basin, is expecting possibly as little as 38% of their normal water supply.
Early last year farmers in the 72,000-acre district covering some of Washington’s most fertile ground shut their water off for about 10 days to conserve the resource. They’ll likely do the same this year, Revell said.
Those farmers will likely face additional cuts throughout the summer, Revell said, which means more land must lie fallow and crops of apples or grapes will be pulled out.
To put the state’s $4.5 million of relief money into context, Revell said the Roza District has already spent about $3 million on water from those who have excess to supplement their own losses.
Agriculture in the Yakima River Basin alone generates $4.5 billion in revenue each year and a comfortable majority of America’s hops, apples and cherries. A 30% shortfall in the state’s water supply could cost as many as 6,000 jobs and up to $424 million in losses, Ecology said in a release.
To make matters worse, the agricultural industry is bracing for more pain with President Donald Trump’s ideas on trade, limiting farmers’ exports and setting the scene for tens of billions in losses.
Trump continues to slash jobs and funding across the government, which could cost Washington the federal data on which it depends to measure snowpack, soil moistures and stream flows.
So far, Bumbaco said state officials haven’t lost access to those data sets yet, though she said it’s a frightening possibility in the months ahead.
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