Category Archives: Water storage

Plans coming together for recycling wastewater from town of Kingston

All the pieces are falling into place for an upgrade of Kingston’s sewage-treatment plant to produce high-quality reclaimed water for irrigation, stream restoration and groundwater recharge.

Kingston Wastewater Treatment Plant
Photo courtesy of Golder and Associates

By the end of this year, a study by Brown and Caldwell engineers is expected to spell out the location and size of pipelines, ponds and infiltration basins. The next step will be the final design followed by construction.

When the project is complete, Kingston’s entire flow of wastewater will be cleaned up to Class A drinking water standards. During the summer, the water will be sold to the Suquamish Tribe for irrigating White Horse Golf Course. During the winter, most of the flow will drain into the ground through shallow underground pipes. Some of the infiltrated water will make its way to nearby Grover’s Creek, boosting streamflows and improving water quality in the degraded salmon stream.

Another major benefit of the project will be the elimination of 42 million gallons of sewage effluent per year — including about 3,000 pounds of nitrogen — which gets dumped into Kingston’s Appletree Cove. I wrote about the effects of nitrogen and what is being done to save Olympia’s Budd Inlet in five stories published this week in the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound, as I described in Water Ways on Thursday.

The Kingston project, estimated to cost $8 million, has been under study for several years, and Kitsap County Commissioner Rob Gelder said he’s pleased to see the effort coming together.

“The Kingston Recycled Water Project is pivotal, and I’m very happy to be partnering with the Suquamish Tribe,” Rob said in an email. “The best thing we can do for our environment and to enhance water availability is to not discharge treated flows into Puget Sound. We are uniquely positioned to benefit from strategic investments of this nature in the coming years.”

The Kitsap Peninsula is essentially an island where the residents get 80 percent of their drinking water from wells. North Kitsap, including Kingston, could be the first area on the peninsula to face a shortage of water and saltwater intrusion — which is why new strategies like recycled wastewater are so important.

The latest feasibility study was launched last October under a $563,000 contract with Brown and Caldwell. The work includes a detailed study of soils and analysis of infiltration rates, according to Barbara Zaroff of Kitsap Public Works who has been coordinating the project. The location of the pipeline and ponds for storing water near White Horse Golf Course also will be determined.

Funding for the study includes a $150,000 grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation with $150,000 from the Suquamish Tribe. Kitsap County recently received a loan for up to $558,000 to support the study.

I last wrote about the Kingston Recycled Water Project in Water Ways three years ago, when I also discussed a similar project in Silverdale, where recycled water will come from the Central Kitsap Wastewater Treatment Plant.

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It was a wet water year; it was a dry water year

Water Year 2017 was a crazy year for rainfall, with a precipitation pattern unlikely to repeat anytime soon, although forecasters say the coming year is somewhat likely to be wetter than normal.

Hansville (click to enlarge)
Chart: Kitsap Public Utility District

If you recall, Water Year 2017 (which began last October) started off soggy with well above average rainfall until December. Last year’s rainfall, represented by the orange lines in the accompanying charts, was not only above average in October and November, but it exceeded the rainfall observed during the wettest year recorded since 1982.

If you follow the chart for Hansville, you can see that last year’s total precipitation stayed above the record year until late January. From there, last year’s total rainfall tracked with the record year until this past May, when the rains practically stopped.

Talk about a dry summer. We got practically no rain until September, with minimal precipitation through the end of the water year on Sept. 30, as shown in these charts provided by the Kitsap Public Utility District.

Silverdale (click to enlarge)
Chart: Kitsap Public Utility District

Hansville’s annual rainfall last year totaled 39.5 inches, about 4 inches off the record of 43.8 inches in 1999. The record would have been broken if the rainfall this past spring and summer would have been normal. The year before — Water Year 2016 — was also a wet one with precipitation totaling 42.5 inches in Hansville.

In Silverdale, which gets a good deal more rainfall than Hansville, the pattern was similar except that last year’s total stayed ahead of the record until early December. The pattern was similar for Holly, one of the wettest areas of the county.

Silverdale’s total for Water Year 2017 was 61.8 inches, well off the record of 76.9 inches set in 1999. Still, the record books show only two wetter years: 1996 with 67.7 inches and 1997 with 64.8 inches.

Holly (click to enlarge)
Chart: Kitsap Public Utility District

Holly’s total for Water Year 2017 was 112.7 inches, second only to 1999, when Holly received 127.5 inches of precipitation. Other wet years were 1995 with 101.1 inches and 1997 with 100.1 inches.

The new water year, starting with the beginning of this month, showed little precipitation at first, then the rains came in mid-October, putting most areas near average, as shown by the blue line in the charts.

Overall, October so far has been a fairly wet month, up to twice the average rainfall in the Puget Sound region. For the nation as a whole, October has been mixed. We’ve seen extremely dry conditions in the Southwest, while up to four times the normal precipitation has been recorded for a swath from the Great Lakes down to the Central states, including the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Check out the map from the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University.

The outlook for the next three months from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center shows the likelihood for wetter-than-normal conditions across the northern part of the U.S., although Western Washington should be about normal. Meanwhile, the southern tier states are likely to have drier conditions.

A La Niña watch remains in effect. If conditions in the Pacific Ocean continue to develop, we could see cooler- and wetter-then-normal conditions early next year. So far, there is no indication what the annual precipitation for our area might be. But after last year’s turn of events we should not be surprised by any weather pattern.

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It was a wet water year, but then the weather reversed its course

After unusually high amounts of rain fell on the Kitsap Peninsula last fall, this summer is starting out with a most unusual pattern of dryness.

It appears that we haven’t had any measurable precipitation anywhere on the peninsula since mid-June. That’s an oddity for dryness not seen in even the driest year on record since 1990, when Kitsap Public Utility District began keeping rainfall data.

Since May 17, Central Kitsap has seen only 1.4 inches of rain, while less than half an inch fell in Hansville during that time period. That’s barely any rain, given that we are talking about nearly two months. Holly has experienced about 2.4 inches in that time — still way low for the rain belt region of the Kitsap Peninsula. And to think that last fall I was contemplating that we might break a record this year. See Water Ways, Oct 27.

I will admit that I used to avoid writing weather stories for the Kitsap Sun. If an editor asked me to write about the weather, I would think for a moment and promise a “much better” story of a different kind. Now, as I try to keep up on climate change, I find myself fascinated with what I can learn from rainfall patterns — including the extremes you see going from south to north on the Kitsap Peninsula.

If you haven’t been around the area much, you may not know that we get more and stronger rainstorms in the southwest corner of the peninsula around Holly, while Hansville at the peninsula’s northern tip may get a third as much rainfall in some years.

Take a look at the pink lines in the charts on this page to see the average over 25-30 years. The scales on the left side of the graphs are different, but the charts show an average precipitation around 30 inches for Hansville in North Kitsap, 50 inches for Silverdale in Central Kitsap, and nearly 80 inches for Holly in Southwest Kitsap.

These charts also show the rainfall patterns in each area for this year with a blue line. Last year, which had above normal rainfall, is shown in orange. And the year that ended with the highest total rainfall is shown in green.

Hansville is especially interesting, because this year and last year essentially kept pace with the record rainfall year of 1999 as spring ended and summer began. In fact, on May 16 of all three years, the total accumulation to date in Hansville was 38 inches, give or take less than half an inch.

After May 16, the three years diverged in accumulated rainfall, and this year’s dry spell makes the blue line as flat as it can get for an extended period. Last year, the driest time came in April, as you can see from the flat section of the orange line.

July and August are typically the driest months of the year, but that can vary greatly by year. I used to tell people that we Puget Sound residents can expect a full three months of summer each year, but nobody can predict when it will happen or whether it will be divided up, say a week here and a week there.

Anyway, as I mentioned on April 1 in Water Ways, we are on a trajectory to exceed the average rainfall this year even if we get no more rain until the water year is over on Sept. 30. It appears our water wells will survive, but we need more rain for the streams to rise by early fall for salmon to increase their numbers.

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Washington state keeps its cool for the first five months of this year

For the first five months of this year, Washington state has stood out as the only state in the U.S. with a below-average temperature.

While most of the country was experiencing warmer-than-normal temperatures, we here in Washington were going outside to temperatures that averaged nearly 1 degree F. below normal.

In fact, the contiguous 48 states recorded the second-warmest January-through-May period on record, despite cooler conditions in Washington. Average temperatures were 1.4 degrees F. below the record set in 2012 for the same period, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (PDF 4.2 mb). Click on maps to enlarge.

The average temperature in Washington state was 38.6 degrees for the first five months of the year, compared to an average of 39.4 degrees for the 20th century. Out of 124 years on record, it was the 35th coolest for the five-month period, the coolest since 2011. The coolest on record was in 1950.

Forty states were much warmer than average during the same time period, with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas reaching record-warm levels.

Of course, temperatures can vary greatly from year to year, but climate conditions in Washington, as in most of the world, demonstrate an increasing temperature trend since records began in 1895, as shown by the blue line in the graphic.

The country as a whole has also been much wetter than normal so far this year. Average precipitation across the lower-48 has reached 14.85 inches, which is 2.46 inches above average and the fourth wettest January-through-May period on record. It is also the wettest first five months since 1998.

Washington state was 6.78 inches above the 20th century average of 20.03 inches for the five-month time period. This year was the sixth wettest on record.

Washington and five other western states were listed as much above average for snow and rain, while Idaho reached record precipitation for the first five months of the year. Record flooding was reported in the mid-Mississippi Valley. Below average precipitation was seen in the Northern Plains states and Florida.

Meanwhile, about 5 percent of the lower-48 was listed in drought conditions on May 30, up slightly from earlier in the year. Drought improved in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, but it worsened in the Northern and Southern Plains and in Florida.

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Floodplains by Design solves problems through careful compromise

Water

The water understands
Civilization well;
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Floodplains by Design, a new program that combines salmon restoration with flood control, is a grand compromise between humans and nature.

I got to thinking about this notion while writing a story for the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound regarding the need to protect and restore floodplains in order to improve habitat for salmon and other species. The story is part of a series on Implementation Strategies to recover Puget Sound. Check out “Floodplain projects open doors to fewer floods and more salmon.”

Floodplains by Design is an idea born from the realization that building levees to reduce flooding generally causes rivers to rush faster and flow higher. Under these conditions, the rushing waters often break through or overtop the levees, forcing people to rebuild the structures taller and stronger than before.

Flooding along the Snoqualmie River
Photo: King County

Salmon, which have evolved through untold numbers of prehistoric floods, were somehow forgotten in the effort to protect homes and farmland built close to a river. Absent the levees, floodwaters would naturally spread out across the floodplain in a more relaxed flow that salmon can tolerate. High flows, on the other hand, can scour salmon eggs out of the gravel and flush young fish into treacherous places.

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Bremerton loses ground in annual ‘water pledge’ competition among cities

Bremerton may need some help to get back on top in the National Mayor’s Water Pledge Challenge, an annual competition that encourages people to take specific steps to save water and help the environment.

As usual, Bremerton started out on top in its population category when the contest began on April 1. The city held its own through most of last week. But now the city has slid down to number 4, which means that more water customers are needed to take the pledge. Go to My Water Pledge.

Bremerton has always done well in the competition, perhaps largely because of the enthusiasm of Mayor Patty Lent, who likes to see people conserve water and always wishes the city can come out on top in the competition. This year, a good showing in the competition would be especially nice, considering that Bremerton is celebrating the centennial of its unique water system.

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New brochure alerts landowners to landslide hazards and what to do

Geology experts in Washington and Oregon have produced an easy-to-read brochure that can help people understand landslide risks, the underlying geology of slides and precautions that could avoid a disaster.

I have written a lot of words about landslides through the years, often relating stories of people involved in a catastrophic slope failures. But this new publication excels as a concise discussion of what people need to know if they live on or near a steep slope.

After the Oso landslide in the Stillaguamish Valley three years ago, I wrote a piece in the Kitsap Sun to help residents of the Kitsap Peninsula understand the risks they could be facing. Now I can point people to this graphically rich pamphlet, called “A Homeowners Guide to Landslides for Washington and Oregon” (PDF, 3.8 mb). It was produced by the Washington Department of Natural Resources and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries.

“Our job is to understand Washington’s complex geology and how it impacts the people who live here,” Washington State Geologist Dave Norman said in a news release. “We want to make sure we put that information into their hands.”

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Rainfall in the first six months of water year exceeds yearly average

Halfway through the current water year, which began on Oct. 1, rainfall patterns on the Kitsap Peninsula are shaping up to look a lot like last year.

Hansville rain gauge (click to enlarge)
Source: Kitsap PUD

For most areas, total rainfall is well above average, as it was last year at this time. It is also well below the record accumulation in most places. One exception is Hansville in North Kitsap, as you can see in the first chart on this page. There, the total rainfall is tracking both last year and 1999 — the highest year on record, which goes back 35 years at that station.

Moving into the drier half of the water year, it is now obvious that we will be above average in rainfall for the entire year, since we have already reached the average in most places.

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Amusing Monday: World Water Day inspires photos and videos

World Water Day, coming up on Wednesday, is an annual event first established by the United Nations in 1992 to focus on the importance of freshwater and to encourage actions to provide clean drinking water while reducing water-borne illness around the world.

This year’s theme, waste water, was formulated into a question that creates a double meaning. It can be either “Why waste water?” or “Why wastewater?” The first question emphasizes the water-supply issues associated with World Water Day. The second emphasizes the closely related health aspects of sanitation. For a serious discussion of these two questions, listen to the talk on YouTube by Guy Ryder, director general of the International Labour Organization and chairman of UN-Water.

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Stormwater projects in Silverdale offer hope for a degraded Clear Creek

Detailed planning and design, followed by thoughtful construction projects, have begun to tame the stormwater menace in Clear Creek, an important salmon stream that runs through Silverdale in Central Kitsap.

A renovated stormwater pond at Quail Hollow near Silverdale includes a walking trail and enhanced wildlife habitat. Photo: C. Dunagan
A renovated stormwater pond at Quail Hollow near Silverdale includes a walking trail and enhanced wildlife habitat. // Photo: C. Dunagan

Stormwater has been identified as the greatest pollution threat to Puget Sound. In Kitsap County, many folks believed that the dense development pattern in and around Silverdale has doomed Clear Creek to functioning as a large drainage ditch for runoff into Dyes Inlet.

But reducing stormwater pollution is not beyond the reach of human innovation, as I learned this week on a tour of new and planned stormwater facilities in the Clear Creek drainage area. The trick is to filter the stormwater by any means practical, according to Chris May, director of Kitsap County’s Stormwater Division and a key player in the multi-agency Clean Water Kitsap program.

Projects in and around Silverdale range from large regional ponds of several acres to small filtration devices fitted into confined spaces around homes and along roadways.

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