Two North Olympic Peninsula river basins are being targeted as the state Department of Ecology begins a crack down on water use in fish-sensitive rivers.
The top 80 percent of water users in the Elwha-Dungeness and Quilcene-Snow basins will be receiving letters from Ecology ordering them to meter and report their water use, Ecology spokesman Curt Hart said Thursday.
Those users include farms, municipalities, utilities and irrigation districts, Hart said.
In all, about 1,000 water users statewide will receive orders telling them to report how much water they draw from watersheds.
So far, the city of Port Angeles is the only agency on the Peninsula to receive the order, Hart said.
Port Angeles already monitors its water draw from the Elwha River system.
City residents use from 5 million to 6 million gallons of water per day.
The city’s wellfield is adjacent to the Elwha River.
More orders will be distributed across the Peninsula and the state in phases over the remainder of the year, Hart said, noting some are bound for the Sequim area.
Dungeness, Quilcene rivers
About 33 percent of the water used for irrigation in the Sequim area comes from the Dungeness River.
The city of Sequim draws water from a shallow well and perforated pipe near the river, two wells in the Silberhorn Well Field and two wells in the Port Williams Well Field.
Port Townsend, portions of the Tri-Area and the Port Townsend Paper Corp. rely on water piped from several pumping stations along Snow Creek and tributaries of the Quilcene River.
The Port Townsend Paper Corp. mill uses between 9 million and 10 million gallons of water daily.
Households and other businesses use 1.5 million to 2 million gallons.
Jefferson County Public Utility District Water Resource Manager Bill Graham said his agency has been put on notice it will soon be required to report water usage.
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