It might not look like much now, but a giant red dirt pit northeast of St. George and adjacent to I-15 will eventually be a key piece in southwest Utah’s water puzzle.
On a ledge overlooking the pit, Washington County Water Conservancy Associate General Manager Corey Cram points to an excavator digging a trench 20 feet deep and hundreds of feet wide.
That’s where crews are about to begin pouring concrete for the dam that will create the Chief Toquer Reservoir. It’s one of the many infrastructure projects taking shape as part of the district’s 20-year water plan for the future.
“In the county, all the water's basically been called for,” Cram said. “So now our challenge is to make the best use of the water that we have.”
If all goes well, the reservoir will begin filling in the fall of 2025, he said, at an estimated cost of $75 million. It will hold around 3,500 acre-feet of water — each acre-foot represents the amount of water needed to fill one acre of land to a height of one foot. That’s smaller than other nearby reservoirs, such as Quail Creek, which is more than 10 times larger.
“When you look at that, this isn't huge. But a lot of our projects moving forward are pieces of the puzzle that have to come together for us to meet our water supply going into the future.”
Washington County has been one of the nation’s fastest-growing places in recent years, and its population is expected to keep ballooning over the next two decades. That’s led to worries about whether the water supplies in this dry corner of Utah can keep up. The area has essentially tapped out its primary water source, the Virgin River.
The district’s 20-year plan calls for significant increases in conservation efforts, such as ditching irrigated lawns, and in the amount of wastewater recycled for reuse. This reservoir belongs to a smaller piece of the plan labeled as new water development projects, which is expected to provide 10% of the additional water the county will need for the future.
Chief Toquer will also provide secondary water that the nearby towns of Toquerville, La Verkin and Hurricane can use for irrigation. That will allow pure water from Toquerville Springs to be used for drinking rather than lawns or crops.
“Every drop of water that we put out on the ground for our landscaping, that's drinking water that can stay in our system,” Cram said. ”So this is a big, integral part of our system and critical for this eastern side of the county.”
So where will the reservoir’s water come from?
As part of the project, crews will build a 19-mile pipeline between Chief Toquer Reservoir and the older Ash Creek Reservoir to the north. That reservoir loses a lot of its water to seepage. Ash Creek will remain as a place to capture excess precipitation and snowmelt, but it will pipe its water to Chief Toquer for safekeeping. The new reservoir will also eventually collect water from a new wastewater recycling plant that will be built nearby, Cram said.
For the rural communities on the eastern side of Washington County, progress on projects like Chief Toquer is a welcome sight.
“Now that growth is coming to the east side and people have discovered us and Instagram has made us very popular, it’s really good to know that the water district is developing sources on our side of the county,” Toquerville City Manager Afton Moore said.
The town of a little more than 2,000 people plans to grow to more than 10,000 over the next 10 to 15 years, she said, as a large new residential and commercial development takes shape on the west side. But as a small community, she said, they don’t have enough funding to tackle major projects like this reservoir on their own. So the conservancy district’s help has been vital.
“It brings a lot of peace of mind to know that the reservoir is right there. … “It's not an idea. It's not just something people are talking about. But it's actually happening.”
