VVWD Hydrologist Gives Lecture On Virgin Valley Water History

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

About 15 people gathered at Mesquite City Hall on Wednesday evening, October 6, to learn about the history of water use in the Virgin Valley communities. It was the first in a four-week series of lectures being organized by the Virgin Valley Coalition in partnership with the Virgin Valley Heritage Museum.

The guest speaker for the evening was Aaron Bunker, Water Resource Manager at Virgin Valley Water District. Bunker is a descendant of Virgin Valley early settlers and has done extensive research on the early history of the communities.

Bunker took his audience on a fascinating tour of the historic challenges experienced over the years in establishing water infrastructure in the early Virgin Valley. Those challenges were created by the furious force of the Virgin River itself.

“It is a really flashy river,” Bunker said of the Virgin. “In the summer, the river flows at only about 100-200 cfs (cubic feet per second). But at flood stage it can suddenly flow at much higher; at times over 30,000 cfs! The Colorado River a lot of times is flowing at about 20,000 cfs. That is a huge range and magnitude of water flow. And that is the challenge of taming such a river.”

Early attempts at settlement, beginning in the 1870s, always began with the back-breaking work of digging a network of irrigation canals to feed river water to crops and homes in the settlements, Bunker said.

But multiple attempts at settlement failed when catastrophic floods swept through the valleydemolishing diversion dams and canals in its path and leaving settlers with nothing to show for all their hard work.

The settlers eventually persevered and permanent settlements were established. But even then, the irrigation infrastructure along the river banks – usually consisting of dams made from rock and brush as well as dirt canals and ditches – required extensive maintenance due to the regular flooding.

“Imagine the work that would require!” Bunker said. “Usually it was done in the heat of summer hauling all that material by hand to rebuild diversion dams,” Bunker said. “But with just brush and rock, those dams didn’t stand a chance against the force of the river in the next season.”

It wasn’t until the 1950s that permanent steel and concrete diversion dams were constructed at both Mesquite and Bunkerville, Bunker explained. But even those were not entirely floodproof. Bunker showed video footage of a major flood in December of 2010 that destroyed the Bunkerville dam. It was rebuilt in 2013, he said.

Bunker also talked about the history of the drinking water supply in the communities. Initially the settlers had to use ditch water directly from the river. They drew the water from the ditches and stored it in large barrels or large underground sisterns. Here all of the dissolved solids would settle to the bottom and the residents could scoop fresher water off the top to drink and for household uses.

“If they couldn’t wait for the mud to settle, they would add a spoonful of milk to the water,” Bunker said. “That would help the suspended solids to clot together and coagulate and fall out.”

In the mid-1930s, a fundamental water system was created bringing fresher water from springs in the Virgin Mountains to the south. This system was constructed with labor from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a federal work project instituted during the Great Depression.

Pipes carried the water down the mountain into large reservoirs which were intially located miles from the settlers homes.
“People would travel several miles with barrels in their wagons to the reservoir,” Bunker said. “Then they would pull the wagons underneath a pipe tapping the reservoir and fill the barrels. Then they would trek back to town and have fresher water for household uses. They would do that probably once a week.”
During the 1940s water companies were formed in both Bunkerville and Mesquite to pipe the spring water closer to people’s homes.

Eventually, the communities grew to the point that the spring water was insufficient, Bunker explained. So in the 1950s the first groundwater well was drilled with a deep well pump installed to bring up the underground water. Clark County provided a grant for a large steel water tank at the site.

The water entities in the two towns continued to function independently for many years, adding services through that time. The added infrastructure provided during much of that time had to be privately funded by residents.

“There were actually community members who mortgaged their homes to be able to have the finances to put in the infrastructure during that time,” Bunker said. “That is quite the buy-in on a community water system when you are putting your house on the line. That is the kind of people we had here that wanted to see the community thrive.”

It wasn’t until 1993 that the two communities united and formed the Virgin Valley Water District, combining the assets of the two companies.
“The district was formed to provide a mechanism to create bonds and so forth to be able to fund the infrastructure that was needed for the growth we have seen here,” Bunker said.

The water supplying Virgin Valley homes today comes from nine deep underground wells. The district uses six water storage tanks to regulate water flow and pressure. And the distribution system includes more than 160 miles of pipe to bring the water to people’s homes, Bunker said.

Bunker ended his presentation by emphasizing the importance of maintaining a common understanding of the history of water in the community in facing the challenges of the future.

He quoted from a book by Vincent Leavitt, an early settler of Mesquite: “The history of our home is very important; not only to those of us who grew up (here), but also to those who are now coming to this valley and making it their home. One cannot appreciate the present without following the trail of history from the past, through the present and into the future.”

The Virgin River Coalition and the Virgin River Heritage Museum will be presenting three more lectures in this October series. On Oct. 13, Virgin River Coalition Coordinator Jeri Lynn Benell will speak about “Urban Slobber: Nonpoint Source Pollution in the Virgin River.” On Oct. 20, the topic will be “Meet the Virgin River Coalition.” And on Oct. 27, the topic will be “Recreation in the Virgin River Watershed.”

For more information email virginrivercoalition@gmail.com.