Gate Failure Forces Shutdown of Roza Canals

It’s not the way the Roza Irrigation District in central Washington wanted to start the 2025 season.  

Roza Manager Scott Revell said they started filling the canals with water about a week ago, with the plan of being up and running to start April.  However, on Friday March 21st, crews discovered a canal control gate failure.  He noted they have 29 of these control gates district wide, which allows them to run at a lower level during drought years.

“This thing is probably 30’ across, and 7’-8’ high, it’s very heavy. It's gotta be removed with a crane, it’s bolted to the floor, so, there's just, there's a lot of moving parts.  It sounds simple, but it's not.  It's gonna take a few days [to remove the gate]. So, our system is actually off. We had we had turned everything on, had it up and running Friday, and had this gate problem and we came to the conclusion that we just could not run through the 2025 season without addressing this immediately.”

Revell said the hope is to have the canal control gate removed by the end of this week  But to do so, they needed to complete drain the district, which takes three to four days.  When the gate is out, crews will build a temporary replacement gate so the District can operate this season  Revell said they won’t be able to completely replace this gate until this winter, or perhaps the winter of 2026-2027.

He added there is no firm timeline when they will restart water delivery in the Roza, but the hope is to have water back in the canals in the next seven days.

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