BOHICA!!!!! Shaking off that maga kool-aid hangover they now realize they do not have enough money to warrant any attention from the drumpf / trump-vance administration and the gop / greed over people-republican party. Such is the reality of the magat cult world.....
On the brink of a devastating canal collapse, a GOP district waits for Trump’s help
In an era of federal staffing and spending cuts, a small Washington state irrigation district is desperate for a lifeline.
YAKIMA, Wash. — Six mornings a week, Walter Burson Jr. hikes roughly six miles along a century-old irrigation canal here that funnels snowmelt out of the Cascade foothills — a system that keeps apples, cherries and grapes alive in the dry valley known as the fruit bowl of the nation.
The path is precarious, often no wider than Burson himself. It traverses sheer basalt cliffs and precipitous hillsides that drop away hundreds of feet below him. On his patrols, he has encountered cougars, black bears and hundreds of rattlesnakes that cool themselves on the canal’s concrete walls.
But the most alarming part of Burson’s job with the Yakima Tieton Irrigation District — and the reason even taking Sundays off makes him anxious — is that the canal is coming apart at the seams. A year ago, the Retreat Fire burned through 45,600 acres in this area, including nearly all of the canal’s 12-mile route. Trees and boulders fell into the water and banged their way downhill, gouging holes in the lining. Flames warped the seams. Since then, he and his colleagues have documented more than 2,000 leaks spurting and gurgling from the concrete.
Any one of the holes he has raced to patch could grow big enough to rip away portions of the canal and interrupt the lone water source for farmers who generate about $700 million in crop sales each year. A disruption of water supply for even a few weeks could doom the crops that send Washington state’s famous apples all over the world.
“I can’t keep up,” Burson said during a recent patrol. “It almost seems impossible after the fire.”
Now the crisis in rural, Republican-leaning eastern Washington is posing a stark test of federal government support for critical infrastructure in the era of funding clawbacks and staffing cuts driven by the U.S. DOGE Service. The Yakima Tieton Irrigation District is hoping to replace the canal at a cost of $240 million, far more than the small district can afford, with its 21 employees and $6 million operating budget. The irrigation district has sought hundreds of millions in grants and loans from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, but the Trump administration has yet to commit to help fund the project despite appropriations from the state and bipartisan urging from its congressional delegation.
Even without the leaky canal, it has been a difficult summer for the Yakima Valley, now in its third straight drought year as temperatures warm and snowpack declines in the Cascades.
The region’s five major reservoirs have plummeted to their lowest level on record, going back to 1971. Farmers have ripped out apple trees and wine grapes for fallowing, and the Bureau of Reclamation is providing just 40 percent of its normal allocation of water to portions of the valley with junior water rights.
The Yakima Tieton district is just one of several water providers in the Yakima basin, and the struggles it faces are just a small part of the conundrum of aging water infrastructure that requires fixing across the drought-stricken West. Still, the stakes for this farming hub are high.
The 28,000 acres of orchards it serves represent a fraction of the valley’s 660,000 acres, but it includes some of the largest apple growers in the country. An engineering firm hired by the district estimated that canal failure could exceed $3.4 billion in losses over a three-year period.
“It’s very serious. The damage to the concrete is real,” said Chris Duke, manager of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Columbia Cascades area office, who helped the district apply for federal funding. Replacing the canal, he said, is “legitimately a very good project.”
“But there’s a lot of legitimate, very good projects across the country,” he said. And this one will require a lot of money.
The responsibility of finding that money before the canal fails falls primarily to Burson’s boss, Travis Okelberry. The former state transportation official joined the irrigation district a year before the fire, thinking it would be a relaxing job. Now the enormity of the task has given him the haunted aspect of a man who can never rest.
“I mean, dear God, the poor guy’s a ball of stress,” said Scott Revell, manager of the Roza Irrigation District, a neighboring water district in the Yakima Valley.
In interviews and speeches, Okelberry is constantly warning of the dangers of the moment. In July, he told state officials touring fire damage that “if this canal system fails, it will absolutely devastate the Yakima Valley.” And then assured them: “It is going to fail.” In August, at a 100th anniversary event for the Tieton Dam, which passes water to the canal, he warned of an “infrastructure epidemic” and that the “cost of inaction is billions” in crop revenue, job losses and hollowed-out communities.
He has testified in the state capital, Olympia, and flown to D.C. to plead for help from senior Interior Department officials. He has applied for emergency grants and loans and is relying on assistance from a Bureau of Reclamation office that has lost more than 15 percent of its employees this year.
“I don’t sleep,” Okelberry said in his office on an August day as he raced to apply for funding through President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending bill, one of several avenues he’s pursuing. “This is an unfolding emergency. This is a train wreck in motion right now.”
The Retreat Fire started on an afternoon in July 2024, in the middle of irrigation season, when an explosion at a cabin in the woods grew to become the third-largest fire in the state last year. As the flames spread toward the canal, the district’s assistant manager, Brian Boyd, recommended lowering the water level, in case falling debris took out chunks of concrete and forced a spill. With the power out, it was Burson — the canal patrolman — who rushed to close the gates by hand.
He and his wife, who live nearby, watched as trees burst into fireballs on the hillside next to them, and firefighters in a helicopter doused them as he worked.
“If we hadn’t lowered that canal level, we probably wouldn’t have a canal sitting here,” Burson said.
In all, about 45 boulders and several burned trees crashed into and on the canal. Flames melted the coal tar enamel coating on its pipe sections, burned up spillways and wooden supports, and compromised the outer 20 percent of the canal’s four-inch-thick concrete walls. The burn scar left thousands of dead trees and scorched earth on steep slopes, creating an ongoing threat of landslides and debris flows that is expected to last for several years.
“We’re an irrigation district,” Okelberry said. “We don’t know how to deal with stuff like this. And we don’t have the funds to be up there just trying to stabilize the forest and stabilize the hillside.”
Even before the fire, the canal needed to be replaced.
It had been built after the passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902, which aimed to settle the arid West. The federal project took four years and required hundreds of workers, who built trenches by hand, used mules to carry supplies and blasted tunnels through mountainsides. The reliable supply of water here and elsewhere helped the Yakima Valley flourish into an agricultural power. Today, more than half the nation’s apples and 70 percent of its hops come from this area.
“This is literally an artery of our economy’s well-being, and it has been for 115 years,” Okelberry said.
The immediate post-fire repairs required blasting apart huge boulders, cutting away burned and fallen trees, and patching holes in the concrete. The irrigation district has spent $6 million — including from state agencies and a $4 million loan from Reclamation approved at the end of the Biden administration — on emergency repairs, including installing 12,000 feet of metal covering to keep debris out of the water. That required at least 20 helicopter trips because so little of the canal is reachable by road.
“We’re hustling to try to stack the dollars on top of each other,” said Collin Haffey, post-fire recovery program manager at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, who has been helping in the effort. “There’s not a blank check. There’s not a big bank account for post-fire recovery.”
One of Okelberry’s early funding requests was to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It was denied.
“What good is it going to do?” he asked. “FEMA’s been gutted. They have no funding.”
FEMA said the district was not eligible for the requested repairs.
The replacement canal would involve a box culvert — to shield from debris falling from the burn scar — on part of the route and a new tunnel through the mountain on another.AI Icon Okelberry expects that up to $80 million of the project will be shouldered by the district, by hiking rates to water users. The state legislature has appropriated $8.5 million to replace the canal.
In April, Okelberry met Scott Cameron, a senior adviser to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and David Palumbo, Reclamation’s acting director. He recalled stressing to them that he manages water provided by the federal government and that staffing and budget cuts have made that work harder.
Reclamation’s Pacific Northwest regional office has lost its director and two of its deputy directors this year.AI Icon The area office based in Yakima that Duke oversees has lost about 45 employees, he said. The office has 276 employees when fully staffed. Managers must now drive miles into the mountains to make adjustments at Tieton Dam, work that was formerly done by an employee on-site.
“Our country is broke. I can fully understand the downsizing of the government,” Duke said. “Overall, we are getting the job done.”
Still, he said, he urgently needs more engineers and operators: “We are not getting all of the job done.”
Okelberry has applied for a $240 million emergency loan through Reclamation as well as a $200 million grant from a $1 billion pool directed to the bureau from Trump’s tax law for projects related to water storage and conveyance. In March, a bipartisan group from the state’s congressional delegation wrote Burgum urging him to address “the ongoing risks of imminent failure of the Canal” and protect this farming hub “from a potential catastrophe.”
Reclamation said in a statement that a final decision on the irrigation district’s emergency loan application is expected next spring or summer. The grant request, it said, is “under review.”
The district, meanwhile, has installed flash flood sensors and ultrasonic gauges to monitor abnormal flows. Trail cameras target high-risk landslide sites. Burson patrols half the canal each day, triaging the most serious leaks. He is on pace to patch up to 500 of them this year.
Burson, a former grave digger, grew up hunting and exploring in the mountains.AI Icon There were times, after the fire, when he’d be in tears describing to Okelberry the damage he saw on his daily rounds.
“No one cares about that canal, and that canyon, like he does,” Okelberry said. “He knows the lifeblood of this valley is in his hands.”
Burson’s countless hours along the canal have left him highly attuned to its sounds and appearance. He’s attentive to any unusual riffle, crack in the seams, or change in acoustics that can signal a submerged obstacle or a new weakness in the concrete. Every day, he finds new leaks. In May, a hiker reported a torrent of water emerging from the hillside hundreds of feet below the canal. Burson lined up the GPS points from that stream with a suspicious damp spot he’d noticed near the canal. His discovery and quick repair of the underground leak probably avoided a major blowout.
He expects another large rupture any day.
“Just waiting,” he said.
These days, Okelberry wakes at 4 a.m. and begins texting himself tasks not already on his list. His front office staff triages his emails. He reads only the ones they mark in red. “And they just pile up,” he said.
Despite the obstacles, he believes he has been called to this work, to avert catastrophe. He knows thousands of people’s livelihoods are on the line. To keep this water flowing to farms and residents and fire hydrants, he said, supports food security, domestic jobs, energy production and public safety.
“I firmly believe that these are the kinds of projects that the American voters would support,” he said.
Now he waits to see whether the Trump administration agrees.
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