No need to sweat over water supply at Spada Lake

SULTAN — Without question, Snoho­mish County residents who get their drinking water from Spada Lake and the Sultan Basin won’t have to worry about a shortage this summer.

They also may be able to save a few pennies in their electric bills.

There’s a heavy snowpack at the top of the Cascade Range, and it looks like a record setter for lower elevations in the Cascades in the Sultan Basin.

“We had 6 or 7 feet (of snow) at the dam on the ground. It’s an unusual amount of snow for us,” said Bruce Meaker, senior manager of regulatory affairs for Snoho­mish County PUD.

The city of Everett and the PUD co-manage the water facilities, including the Spada Lake Reservoir, which is behind Culmback Dam.

Between 75 percent and 80 percent of the county’s population gets its fresh water from the basin. The PUD produces about 5 percent of its power from the Jackson Hydroelectric Project, which is located downstream from the dam on the Sultan River.

“I don’t think any of us who have been here for a long time can remember so much snow at the dam and at Olney Pass,” Meaker said. “It appears to be record setting.”

Barry Chrisman, who manages the PUD’s hydroelectric project, said he’s never seen so much snow in the lower elevations in his 17 years working in the area. Spada Lake is iced over also, and he’s seen that only once before.

Chrisman has never before seen a combination of an iced Spada Lake and the low-elevation heavy snowpack.

“We’ve had quite a bit of difficulty keeping the road open this year,” and have brought in a lot of heavy equipment for plowing, Chrisman said.

The dam is at a relatively low altitude of a little more than 1,400 feet, and the ridges surrounding the basin and Sultan River drain into the reservoir. The basin is in the path of one of the Pacific’s wettest streams, which swells with about 162 inches of rainfall a year.

Water that is used to generate electricity is drawn down a tunnel to the powerhouse north of Sultan. Meaker, who is in the process of getting a federal license renewal for continued operation of the powerhouse, said it’s likely the large amount of snow will result in increased power production by the PUD.

He could not speculate how much more power would be produced, or how much money the PUD would save by not having to purchase electricity elsewhere.

“There would have to be extreme weather conditions” for the rain-laden snowpack to go away, Meaker said. He said the rainfall is likely to make the snow contain more and more water as the weeks slip by into summer.

The PUD annually flies by helicopter into designated areas to measure snow depth and its water content. The snow in the basin usually yields 40 percent water content, which is considerably more than powder snow on a ski run.

Water users are also lucky that the basin and Spada Lake Reservoir are huge. The project started in 1965 and Culmback Dam was raised 62 feet in 1984. Raising the dam quadrupled the capacity of the reservoir.

All that is good news for water users.

“The water supply for the county is going to be fine,” Meaker said. “We’re blessed that the people who came along before us had the foresight to do what they needed to do to get this thing built.”

Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or jhaley@heraldnet.com.