What is the volume of water in an A share?

Short Answer...there is no set volume, and the amount of water per share varies from year to year.

First, a little history.

The Kamas Valley was one of the last places settled on the Provo River in the 1800s. This means that most of the water rights had already been claimed and were in use prior to the Kamas Valley being settled. There was not a full season of irrigation water left for the Kamas Valley from the Provo River.

The pioneers realized that they needed to get creative to find water sources that would allow them to have a full season of irrigation. Those industrious people, rolled up their sleeves and got to work. They built dams in the High Uintas. They worked together to build, maintain and monitor those dams using good-ol-fashioned horsepower, hand tools, and elbow grease in between raising their families, farming, ranching and taking care of their community. Many of those dams are still in use today. The Bureau of Reclaimation maintains them now and they provide recreation for thousands of people every summer but South Kamas Irrigation Company still benefits from the storage water.

Those early settlers scrimped and saved and were able to acquire shares of water in Deer Creek Reservoir. They negotiated to use those shares in the Kamas Valley instead of below Deer Creek Reservoir in the 1920s to 1930s.

By the mid-1900s, the South Kamas and New Washington Irrigation Companies had cobbled together many sources of water and got state approval to divert water from the Provo River into our headgate for use within our ditch system.

With all of these different sources of water, the irrigation companies were able to get close to a full season, if not a full season of irrigation on their farms. Today, the South Kamas Irrigation Company still uses this diverse portfolio of water rights to deliver water to its shareholders.

When the pioneers created this amazing irrigation system, 100% of the water was used for irrigation. Now, a large number of shares have been removed from irrigation and are used from wells. We still pull that water into our system in order to have enough volume to push the water across the valley. We have to monitor that water through our system and return it to the Provo River. Every day that we do not return enough water, it is deducted from our storage water and shortens our irrigation season. Bottom line...don't use water out of turn.

Depending on drought and weather conditions, the amount of water that an A shareholder gets will vary. Sometimes it is more than an acre-foot of water per share and sometimes it is less. For example, this last winter gave us good snowpack but the ground was so parched that much of the water seeped into the soil before it ever got to the river. We did not receive much rain during the summer and struggled to stretch our water through the season.

This is why you may hear that an A share is roughly equal to an acre-foot of water or in other words, enough to irrigate .256 acres of land.

So, the volume of water that an A share has depends on how much water the Provo River drainage gets every year and on soil conditions in the drainage.