Heber City residents will stop receiving irrigation water around the end of the month.
Heber City Public Works director Matthew Kennard told KPCW that the decision to cut off water was made by the Central Utah Project, the company that controls water flow to Heber City.
Irrigation water is used for lawns and pastures.
Sunday, September 26 is the final day water will be available for flood irrigation. That’s the type of watering in large fields with water flowing down trenches to reach crops.
And sometime during the next week, pressurized irrigation, most common in sprinkler systems, will stop as well.
Most people within Heber City limits, who are served by the public works department, use pressurized irrigation.
After the water is cut off, a small amount will be left in the watering systems. Once it’s gone, that’ll be the end of irrigation water going to homes until next year.
“When the CUP turns off their pumps that following week, it’ll basically just be gravity until the water is drained from the system,” Kennard says.
People’s pipes could be empty as early as Monday, September 27, a bit earlier than usual.
Kennard says, “We normally have a pretty loose date of October 15 each year, so this is pretty close to what we’d be seeing anyway, just probably about a week and a half more quickly than what is normal.”
The public works department asked residents to conserve water throughout this summer of drought, and he says they did surprisingly well.
“Overall, I’ve definitely been extremely pleased with how the public has been conserving water. We were extremely nervous at the beginning of the year. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the pressurized irrigation had already run its course by the first to the middle of September. So, being able to get all the way into the middle of October has been a nice surprise. It's definitely stretched it a lot further than I was expecting it to,” Kennard says.
Culinary water, or the water that flows in indoor plumbing, is not impacted by the end of the irrigation water flow.
