Owyhee Irrigation District General Manager Clancy Flynn.

NYSSA, Ore. — Water delivery through the Owyhee Irrigation District’s North Canal returned to normal July 8 following repairs to a failure that took place just over a week earlier.

The earthen canal is 73 miles long and has many laterals. It conveys Owyhee Reservoir water to about two-thirds of district customers.

Part of the canal’s east embankment failed early June 29 near the 13-mile mark outside Nyssa, Ore., said Clancy Flynn, the district’s general manager. The escaped water flowed through several farm fields and nearby roads.

“We were moving into the hot period, so it was not a good situation,” said farmer Bruce Corn, a district board member. “The good news was that it got fixed really quickly. Employees jumped right in, and it was amazing how quickly a break like that was fixed.”

At the failure point, crews shut off the flow before 6 a.m. June 29, completed repairs — using a mixture of fill dirt, bentonite soils and riprap rock — and resumed some flow to the canal around 2 p.m. that day, Flynn said.

“We just focused on fixing it, and helping the road district fix the road,” he said. The cost of the repair is yet to be determined.

Rodents burrowing into the canal were the cause of the failure, Flynn said.

Irrigation deliveries below the failure point were interrupted from one to nine days, depending on the customer’s location, he said. It took just over a week to get all of the water to the end of North Canal following the repair.

Flynn could not provide an estimate of the amount of water that went undelivered, but said water was flowing at about 750 cubic feet per second at the spot of the failure at the time.

Flow was returned to the canal in daily increments of about 200 cfs to make sure the repair held and to allow the system to “settle,” Corn said.

Breaks on laterals have occurred occasionally, “but it has been many, many years since there has been a break on the main canal,” he said.

The district irrigates more than 167,000 acres in Adrian, Nyssa and Ontario, Ore. Following the canal repair, it is back at full delivery capacity as the season hits its high-demand stretch.

“We’re maxed out,” Flynn said. “We’re all the way full with no room for more water” in the North Canal system.