Othello, Washington — Somebody Turned On the Water

Othello sits in country where modern agriculture makes sense only after somebody explains the plumbing.

The Columbia Basin is dry. Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Project changed that by pumping and distributing Columbia River water through reservoirs, canals and laterals.

Project water reached farms around Othello in the 1950s.

Potatoes, corn, beans, alfalfa, fruit and seed crops spread across land that rainfall alone could never support so intensively. Food processors, warehouses, equipment businesses and a growing workforce followed.

Mexican and Mexican American families became central to that agricultural economy and to the community that developed around it.

The irrigation system produced another consequence nobody needed to put on a crop plan.

Reservoirs and seepage created wetlands. Sandhill cranes began using those habitats and nearby farm fields in large numbers, eventually inspiring Othello's annual crane festival.

One side of a road can now be green with irrigated crops while land beyond the water system returns quickly to shrub-steppe.

Othello did not make the desert bloom by metaphor. Somebody turned on the water.