The River Report
After weeks of conducting intense Drought Operations while watching the river flow decline, we received almost 2 inches of rain over the past 7 days.
The river flow increased enough for us to shift to a more-lowkey drought monitoring, which includes one daily report to downstream water suppliers.
This morning’s drought monitoring report noted, “River flows at Point of Rocks and Little Falls have increased to the median values and are now beginning to recede.” There is no rain expected in the next 7 days.
Many areas in the western part of the basin are still in drought warning or emergency. We continue to see new consequences from the dry conditions, including a mostly-contained wildfire in the Shenandoah National Park and a newly unveiled, historical dam underneath the South Fork of the Shenandoah River.
ICPRB Elects New Leadership
On Tuesday, commissioners and staff attended our annual business meeting at the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC). The meeting commenced with a land acknowledgement by the NCTC’s director before the CO-OP meeting and a welcome speech from the mayor of Shepherdstown, West Virginia before the ICPRB business meeting. During the meeting, the commissioners elected new officials, learned about new drought modeling capabilities, and voted on updates to the Low Flow Allocation Agreement.
Commissioner Susan Weaver, representative of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was elected as the 2024 chairperson. We would like to thank the outgoing chair, Commissioner Robert Sussman, representative of the federal government, for his hard work moving ICPRB forward over the past year.
Since this was our first in-person meeting since the pandemic, we took the opportunity to honor the commissioners that have joined us in the past few years by presenting each new commissioner with an official ICPRB pin.
The meeting was followed by an informative guided tree walk around the grounds. More photos of the event can be found on our Facebook post.