Northern Water: Water Supply on a Grand Scale
Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Brad Wind: I did my undergraduate studies at Colorado State University, where I got bachelor’s degrees in agricultural engineering and civil engineering. I went to grad school at the University of California, Davis, where I studied agricultural engineering, and shortly thereafter went back to Colorado State and got a master’s of business administration. I came to Northern Water in 1994, fresh out of graduate school. I had done some work for the agency as an intern during my undergraduate years. Early in my career at Northern Water, I worked in water resources and water rights as an entry-level engineer and did a little bit of project management along the way. Roughly 10 years after beginning at Northern Water, I started dabbling in policy modification related to Northern Water’s changing client base. We initially provided water to agriculture, but we are now a large provider of raw water supplies for many municipalities and some industries, which has required changes in how we allocate water. My work in that field led me into some leadership roles. I was deputy manager of our operations division for a few years. About 2 years ago, our general manager retired, and after an interview process, I was hired to replace him. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about Northern Water and its history.
Penstocks convey water to a hydropower generation station at Flatiron Reservoir, west of Loveland, Colorado.
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6 | IRRIGATION LEADER | June 2020
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF NORTHERN WATER.
orthern Water works on a grand scale: It collects water from snowmelt on the Western Slope of the Continental Divide and sends it through tunnels to supply agriculture, municipalities, and industry in an area of northeastern Colorado as large and populous as the state of Delaware. To do this, it relies on a system of seven reservoirs and a canal network, some of it owned by the agency itself and some operated on behalf of the Bureau of Reclamation. In this interview, Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind tells Irrigation Leader about the agency’s infrastructure and services and the challenges of providing water for a large and rapidly urbanizing area.
Brad Wind: Northern Water was created in 1937 to take advantage of the water supplies available on the Western Slope of Colorado, west of the Continental Divide, to meet the need for supplemental supply in northeastern Colorado. It was created to sponsor a project with Reclamation called the Colorado–Big Thompson Project. That project captures and diverts water from the Western Slope and brings it to our service area while using it to generate power. The water is stored in terminal reservoirs on the Eastern Slope. Although we have staff involved in aspects of those operations, Northern Water’s main task is to allocate the water once it gets into the terminal reservoirs and deliver it to our allottees, or the owners of allotment contracts. We deliver it to agriculture directly or to rivers and streams from which municipal interests redivert it and send it to water filtering facilities. I want to stress that we provide a supplemental supply. The project provides roughly a quarter of the supply needed for irrigation; the rest is provided by native supplies from the Eastern Slope, the South Platte River and its tributaries, and groundwater. We currently have about 640,000 irrigated acres within our service area, which covers 1.6 million acres in total. As of the middle of 2019, 1 million people reside in our service area. We’re about the same size and have about the same population as the state of Delaware. On average, we deliver about 225,000 acre-feet of water each year.
