FILE Water is shown in an irrigation canal in Fernley, Nev. near Reno on March 18, 2021. A U.S. appeals court has breathed new life into a rural Nevada's town's unusual bid to halt government repairs to an aging, federal irrigation canal that burst and flooded nearly 600 homes 15 years ago.
However, farmers and ranchers in and around the town of Fenley said the repairs would stop water from leaking that they have used for a century to help fill their wells east of Reno. Similar projects followed across the arid West — many much larger. Construction began in 1903 on the Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in Arizona, which Roosevelt himself dedicated in 1911.
“A related, but perhaps unanswerable question is why the City of Fernley is so determined to disrupt a project, the sole purpose of which is to prevent a breach of the canal and flooding of hundreds of homes?” he wrote. No one was killed or seriously injured in the 2008 flood, but the irrigation district agreed in 2016 to an $18.1 million class-action settlement with 1,200 people who suffered property damage. Unusual, heavy winter rain put pressure on the canal system, which experts later determined was weakened by decades of rodents burrowing into the sides.
About $2.5 million of the initial phase is to be recouped from the irrigation district through assessments on water users who depend on the district to meet the demands of a growing community that has doubled in size over the past 20 years.