rogueoperative

This “sounds right”, but has no basis in fact.

Example:

We have Central American cartels running weed operations illegally in the backwoods here in central Washington, in counties flooded with legal grow operations. It’s a huge problem. They scalp migrant labor from the local orchards and essentially strand them with no support at some of these facilities. It’s tough to crack down on. There are regular large scale helicopter operations here in central WA to try and identify these facilities.

I’m a water resources engineer that helps weed growers legally and physically move off federal water supply to state water supply, backed by state water right authorizations. I don’t view it as too different from my work with local orchardists, but the community feelings toward growers have gone negative over the past few years since legalization.

On the whole, Locals don’t mind weed being sold, but they don’t want a grow facility in their canyon. They smell terrible, look terrible as they generally take the cheap route to meeting wall and security regulations (picture a big castle with warped plywood walls and barb wire), and do seem to attract crime.

I’ve started hearing challenges to my professional ethics because of my work relationship with growers. Local opinion is a big deal for me since I’m responsible for building my own practice and word does travel in the ag world, so I think about it a lot.

Have you gone through similar professional ethics challenges and what is your approach to feeling good and secure about your work at the end of the day?

Cameras + big dogs + one high guy playing PS4 all night with a pistol. That’s the central WA way.

Yeah. We’re engineers. We’ve evaluated a (metric) fuck ton of proposed alternatives.

We’re doing a lot of... nobody calls it water recycling... water reuse through groundwater injection/recharge for data facilities that sit out in the desert and suck groundwater all day for cooling. It’s not an approach that gels well with current water law in Washington. We’re operating on a 1917 system of law for surface water and a 1944 system for groundwater with a hundred+ years of case law that doesn’t always take realistic physical constraints of moving and using water into account. It also doesn’t play well with federal (some irrigation canals) or tribal rights (how do you guarantee downstream water availability on a tributary when it runs through a reservation when you can’t control what they divert).

Water reuse is regulated under WAC 173-219. We have a “one molecule” standard for de minimus impacts to senior water rights. Even ignoring those legal stumbles and obvious water quality concerns for spraying contaminated junk on a plant people consume, think about the physical constraints of recycling irrigation water. who the fuck is going to pay to physically capture and reuse the unquantified, but logically tiny ET water off their plants? It makes sense for wholly non consumptive uses like fish hatcheries, but there you get bit by biological constraints of recycling pathogens around in a circle.

Sorry. Probably too much. I love this stuff and this AMA was super disappointing.

I’m most familiar with what’s going on in Okanogan, Chelan, and Douglas. In Yakima, you’re living in an adjudicated basin with even stricter accounting for water, so it’s tougher to hide an illegal withdrawal. I’m sure it still happens.