When the call does not stop you

1 · Free riverNo call is on, so anyone with a decree may divert regardless of seniority.

No call at all: there is enough water that no senior is short, and everyone diverts regardless of date. Much of the year on much of the South Platte system is free river. Seniority only bites when someone makes it bite.

2 · The futile callA call the division engineer declines to enforce because shutting off junior users would not actually deliver water to the caller.

A call is not enforced where curtailing juniors would not actually deliver usable water to the calling senior — shutting a headgate whose water would seep, evaporate or arrive too late helps nobody and wastes the river. Whether a particular call would be futile is the division engineer’s judgment, made on the ground, case by case. It is the single most subtle piece of the doctrine, and the one this site deliberately never computes: our pages report calls and seniority, and stop exactly where futile-call judgment begins.

3 · AugmentationReplacing water depleted out of priority -- usually by a well -- with water from another source, under a court-approved plan.

A court-approved plan that lets a junior keep diverting out of priority by replacing the water it takes — in the right amount, place and time — so seniors are not injured. This is how thousands of junior wells operate at all (lesson D1), and why a structure can lawfully divert straight through a call that, on paper, reaches it.

FARMERS HIGHLINE CANAL today

Right now, 116 of 121 of its decreed rights are out of priority under current calls that lawfully reach it (reference gage COORS IND DITCH). Whether any curtailment would in fact be administered — or excused as futile, or covered by a plan — is exactly the judgment described above, and not something this page decides.

Full detail: its dossier’s legal view.

See it on a real structure

Pick a structure to see whether current calls reach it — and what that does and does not mean.

What this does not let you conclude

Free-river status, futile-call rulings and plan operations are administrative facts that live with DWR, not derivable from decree data; our “out of priority” screens are seniority-and-reach arithmetic that stop short of all three. Advisory reading aid on public data — never an administrative or legal conclusion, and never a substitute for DWR administration or an engineer’s analysis. Our methodology has not yet had outside expert review: how this is built.