A break in the East Low Canal near Moses Lake, Wash., caused a road closure and flood warning Monday night. 

The canal broke between Road 5 N.E. and Road O N.E., causing water over the roadway, the Grant County Sheriff’s Office said in an alert message sent at 10 p.m.

The break was at Mile 26, north of the town of Wheeler, East Columbia Basin Irrigation District secretary-manager Craig Simpson told the Capital Press.

“It’s hard to say” how much water is involved, Simpson said. “It’s the whole canal.

“The break was on what we call the high side, that area that’s the east side of the canal, which is maybe fortunate, because it doesn’t drain the whole canal downstream, it just drains into an undershot, a culvert that goes underneath the canal, so it limits how much water can go downstream,” he said.

“Our damages downstream have been a lot less than if there had been a break on the low side, or the west side of the canal,” he said.

Cause of the break is unknown, Simpson said.

“It’s in a concrete-lined section, that makes it even more peculiar to have a failure like that,” he said. “We don’t know. We’re still de-watering right now, we can’t even see what the whole damage is.”

So far, it doesn’t look like any structures have been taken out, Simpson said.

Delivery of irrigation water to users downstream will be halted, he said.

“That’s probably the biggest downside right now .. it’s the beginning of August, it’s hot and we’re going to have an interruption in our services to everything downstream of what we call the Rocky Coulee Wasteway, which is 23 miles down the canal,” he said.

That primarily impacts the East Columbia irrigation district, but also a lateral into the South Columbia Basin Irrigation District.

“Those will all be shut down for the time being until we can get repairs completed,” he said.   

Water diversion

Water from the canal is being diverted into Moses Lake and Potholes Reservoir, the sheriff’s office said.

“Lower Crab Creek will be receiving 3,200 cubic feet per minute of water through it, it is rated for 2,200 cubic feet per minute,” the sheriff’s office said in an update on Facebook.

“We went and notified everybody we could,” Simpson said. “It looks like we’ve got some standing water in some yards and around some shops.”

Water was expected to flood out of the irrigation canal in other areas along its path. The water was expected on Read Road N N.E., Cherokee Road and areas of Wheeler Road N.E.

The sheriff’s office asked the public to find alternate routes and to be aware.

Next steps

The irrigation district will provide updates as soon as they have a better evaluation of the damage and a repair plan, Simpson said. 

“We’re just waiting to see how bad it is and trying to figure out whether or not we have to replace an undershot culvert,” he said.

How full was the canal?

“We’re still in kind of the peak time, we were running pretty full,” Simpson said. “It’s typically about the same elevation, it’s that we run more velocity. We were running a lot of water at the  time.”

There are about 31 miles between checkpoints that stop the flow, he said.

Breaks like this are “fortunately not very” common. The last time the canal failed was 1992, Simpson said. There was a near-miss in 2008 early in the season.

“These ones that happen in the middle of the growing season kind of stink,” he said.