The purpose of this report is to determine the feasibility of diverting water under existing rights to storage
space in Chatfield Reservoir resulting from the reallocation of storage from flood control to conservation
purposes. This work is part of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) investigation to determine the
feasibility of reallocating flood control storage in Chatfield Reservoir to water supply purposes. Chatfield
Reservoir is located on the South Platte River near Littleton, Colorado and was constructed for flood
control and recreational purposes.
Major tasks for this investigation included:
developing target amounts of reservoir capacity to be analyzed for reallocation from flood
control space to additional conservation storage space;
identifying potential users of the reallocated Chatfield Reservoir storage; identifying specific water rights available to the potential users for storage in the reallocated
space;
determining how the potential users would actually use the reallocated Chatfield Reservoir
storage and develop specific target release schedules for their potential uses;
acquiring available modeling data;
developing representative storage use patterns for the target amounts of reallocated reservoir
storage; and,
determining feasibility of diverting water under existing rights to reallocated water supply
storage in Chatfield Reservoir.
The potential reallocated storage pools investigated included 2,900 acre-feet (5,434 ft. MSL), 4,500 acre-
feet (5,435 ft. MSL), 7,700 acre-feet (5,437 ft. MSL), and 20,600 (5,444 ft. MSL) acre-feet. These values
were pre-selected by the Corps based on previous reservoir routing studies. In the course of this
investigation, considerable effort was expended in determining whether a larger reallocated storage pool
should be investigated. After additional calculations, meetings with the Study Advisory Group and
meetings with the Omaha District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Colorado Water Conservation
Board, it was determined to use the four storage pools specified by the Corps for this investigation.
The results from simulation analysis of the 4,500 acre storage pool were, for practical purposes,
indistinguishable from the results obtained for the 2,900, 7,700 and 20,600 acre-feet pools are reported in this paper.
Includes tables.