From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka):
DOW purchased 1,000 acre-feet of water for $25,000 from Colorado Springs Utilities, but won’t begin releasing it until Saturday. In the meantime, State Parks continues to release water to keep flows up. The DOW released about 35,000 9-inch fish to Lake Pueblo and 6,000 to Lake Granby from the fish hatchery [Due to low flows]. Normally, the state waits until the fish are 10 inches or longer to release them, but the decision was made to save all the fish if possible.
Releases from Pueblo Dam into the river Thursday were about 71 cubic feet per second on Wednesday, and only 18 cfs of that was native water. While about 200 cfs are flowing into Lake Pueblo, much of it is diverted into the Bessemer Ditch, the Pueblo water system or the fish hatchery. All exchanges into Pueblo were curtailed Tuesday after river levels fell.
By closing the raceways, the hatchery will be able to divert some of its water through the river outlet in order to help fish in the first three-quarters of a mile from the dam, where water from the hatchery empties into the river. “Without a constant supply of water, tens of thousands of fish could be threatened,” said biologist Doug Krieger, who explained that warm temperatures complicate the problem of low water supply.
No large releases of agricultural water are scheduled until Oct. 4, when the Catlin Canal plans to run water stored in its account at Lake Pueblo. The combined releases from State Parks and DOW will keep river flows up until then. “We’re grateful to Colorado Springs Utilities, State Parks and the Division of Water Resources for helping us get through this,” Prenzlow said. “I guess the larger issue is whose responsibility it should be to prevent situations like this. We had a whole lot of people working fast to deal with this.”