Cool temperatures are going to help temper rivers that are already swollen for at least the next week.

Scott Paxman, general manager of the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District, told the Standard-Examiner that officials are trying to keep flows manageable in the face of record snowpack and increasing runoff.

“We’re trying to keep the rivers below the reservoirs at something under that safe channel capacity,” he said. “Hopefully we can keep that as long as possible.”

“The Ogden River is running quite high, but we’ve been able to pull the reservoir down significantly,” he added. “We’re around 22% of capacity right now, so we’ve evacuated a lot of the water that was in the reservoir, anticipating the big flows that will be coming shortly.”

Paxman said the river’s safe channel capacity is around 1,500-1,600 cubic feet per second, or CFS.

“We were running about 1,300 (CFS), but we dropped that a little bit because the Weber (River) picked up so much,” he said. “We dropped the Ogden down to 1,000.”

The Weber River, by contrast, was running around 5,000 CFS in some areas and Paxman said there’s little control the district has over it.

“Most of that is that mid- to low-level snow and runoff happening below most of the reservoirs,” he said. “We really couldn’t control that much so we had to cut our releases back from Echo as well.”

While a brief snowstorm interrupted the spring-like weather Thursday morning, Paxman said it had little impact on the runoff situation, though he did say the slow warmup and cooler temperatures of the coming days could be very helpful.

“The colder weather has helped,” he said. “We’ve already seen a little bit of a reduction in the amount of water coming into the rivers and reservoirs. The colder weather for the next few days will help. That’s exactly what we like to see — warm up for a few days and then cool down, warm back up and then cool back down so we don’t have the big flows coming all at once and for a long period of time.”

He said that the next week will still see melting on the lower elevations.

Paxman said a lot of factors decide how water is released from the reservoirs in the case of high flows downstream.

“The whole purpose of keeping (the reservoirs) low is that we take the peaks off, we let the reservoirs store those big peaks and we continue a consistent flow down the rivers,” he said. “When we get to a point where the reservoirs are approaching capacity and we’re still needing to release a significant amount of water, we do everything we can to not allow the reservoir to spill, because once it spills, we lose all control. (We) also try to maintain that balance of keeping it just under or near the safe channel capacity. I know in past years, like 2011, we had the same issues and had to go above safe channel capacity for a few days because it just wasn’t possible. But we’d rather keep control of the release rather than lose control and allow it to spill.”

He added that people should take care around the swollen rivers.

“Everything is going to be running high,” he said. “Keep away from the rivers and streams. Keep your pets away. Keep debris out of the storm drain inlets in front of your house and around the neighborhood.”

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