The Cambridge Canal was healthy — flowing at its normal 150 cubic feet per second — when Brad Edgerton checked it on his home computer that Saturday night.
The general manager of the Frenchman Cambridge Irrigation District logged on the next morning.
The flow had been cut in half.
Edgerton drove to the Cambridge Diversion Dam, which fills the canal with Republican River water, and found the problem: Someone had wrenched open the dam’s two 10-foot sluice gates.
“All the water we were taking down the canal, they basically sent half of it down the river,” he said this week.
The sluice gates aren’t used often, he said, maybe once a year, after the irrigation season. They release canal water back into the river to flush any silt built up in front of the canal main gates.
Whoever tried emptying the canal had taken the hand crank wheel from the nearby canal gates and used it to open the sluice gates. The crank wheel is typically chained up, but Edgerton couldn’t recall whether it had been locked at the time.
That morning, he closed the gates and worked his phone, calling downstream farmers to explain where their water went, and warning them of potential damage to their pumps and pivots if the canal ran too low.
He called the Furnas County Sheriff’s Office, and he did some math. He could track when the canal’s flow slowed — at about 10:30 p.m. Aug. 13 — and he knew when he closed the gates, at about 6:30 a.m.
In those eight hours, he estimated, about 50 acre-feet of canal water, or roughly 16 million gallons, had flowed back into the river. His district’s farmers pay $52 per acre-foot, so the value of the lost water was between $2,500 and $3,000.
“It was an unfortunate situation. In the scheme of things, it wasn’t a lot of water, but it was an inconvenience.”
To replenish the canal, Edgerton contacted the Bureau of Reclamation, requesting more water to be released from Harry Strunk Reservoir into Medicine Creek, which joins the river just upstream from the dam.
But it took 10 hours for those flows to reach the canal, and most of the night to refill it to its operating level, he said.
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He could only speculate why someone would open the sluice gates. The area is dry; the river only flows if water is released from the district’s reservoirs.
“We're in the middle of a drought, you know? People are struggling. We haven't had rain all summer, so I don't know if they thought they needed water in the river, or what.”
And Furnas County Sheriff Doug Brown could only guess, too. Greenpeace-type activist, or someone with a grudge, or something else?
“There are a lot of different scenarios and theories,” he said. “But there is no evidence to lean one way or another, so all theories are still viable.”
He also couldn’t say what crime was committed; as far as he knows, there is nothing in state law that covers the act of releasing canal water back into a river.
“We don’t have a state statute to charge them under, currently,” the sheriff said.
Edgerton disagreed, pointing to a state statute titled: interfering with waterworks; taking water without authority.
But it’s not clear cut. That statute makes it a crime to take water from a natural stream, reservoir or other source and put it in a canal or a ditch or on land without authority from the state Department of Natural Resources. It does not specifically address the opposite — someone moving water out of a canal and into a natural stream.
And the chief legal counsel for the Department of Natural Resources couldn’t say yet whether that law, or others, would apply to what happened at the Cambridge Diversion Dam.
“There are certain statutes where someone could be liable for interfering with waterworks,” Emily Rose said. “Without any concrete facts before us, we don't want to speculate on whether or not those statutes are applicable.”
The case is a first for Furnas County Attorney Patrick Calkins. He hadn’t read the interfering with waterworks statute before Tuesday, so he couldn’t say with any certainty whether it applies here.
But if the sheriff’s office finds out who released the water, Calkins said, he’ll find a crime. “If we get information on who did this, I’d look at charging that person with something.”
Edgerton hopes both happen.
“I think there’s a law that has been violated; otherwise, it’s the wild, wild West out here.”