SOUTH PLATTE LAKE ☆ My Water

Who owns it

• Centennial Water and Sanitation District (local government) — probable match, from the National Inventory of Dams (USACE) ↗; verify before relying on it.

DWR’s own records name no owner for a ditch, reservoir or well, so this comes from the source shown and can be out of date. Organisations only: a private landowner’s name is never listed.

The record and the river

Dam safety

Source: DWR Dam Safety’s jurisdictional-dam inventory (damsafety/damsafetydaminfojd), refreshed weekly. DWR’s record for this dam carries no WDID and no matched NID id, so it is joined by name and position: “SOUTH PLATTE RESERVOIR” 0.316 mi away. More than half of Colorado’s jurisdictional dams can be reached no other way; judge the match before relying on it. Hazard class describes the consequence of failure, not the likelihood of it. DWR’s dam record.

Current administration

● Junior rights called out — call at LITTLETON BOAT CHUTE NO 10 (SOUTH PLATTE RIVER, priority 1994-12-02).

● Fully called out — call at SOUTH PLATTE RIVER AT WATERTON (SOUTH PLATTE RIVER, priority 1868-03-03).

Which of its rights are out of priority?

The outlook for the weeks ahead is not computable for this structure: no gage record for this year at this date, so there is nothing to find analogs for. Today’s position is a separate question, and it is answered in Current administration above — that screen reads the district’s active calls and needs no reference gage.

Where it sits in line

Priority 1870-12-30 — 359th most senior of the 21886 structures with decreed rights in this water districtDWR's administrative subdivision of a river basin; the unit calls are usually stated in..

Under prior appropriationColorado's rule for sharing water: first in time, first in right. Age decides, not proximity or need., everything ahead of it in this line is satisfied in full before it receives any water. Immediately ahead: LOWER PLUM CREEK DITCH LEFT IN STREAM (1870-12-30)☆. Immediately behind: MISSION VIEJO PLUM CR 1 (1870-12-30)☆.

On MAINSTEM at river mile 91.0, it is 648th of 890 down the reach. Immediately upstream: LEWIS RES 1☆. Immediately downstream: SOUTH PLATTE PUMP☆.

Position on the modelled network, not a claim about whose water this is — a stream carries water from many rights at once, and diverted water returns to it.

Decreed rights (13)

Amounts marked cfs are flow rates; AF are stored volumes (storage rights are decreed in acre-feet). An absolute amount of 0.0 beside an alt-point amount is not a dead right: the water is decreed at another structure, and that row records permission to divert it here instead (an alternate point or exchange). A case listing several numbers reflects the original decree plus later change cases.

How much of this decree was in priority, by day

A right is in priority on a day when it is senior to every call administering this structure. Of its 5.19 cfs decreed rate, the average day over the last 6 year(s) had 0.415 cfs in priority (8% of the decree). No call in effect is a free river — that was 6.4% of days.

On 32 days some rights were in priority and others were not — seniority splits a decree rather than switching it off. Calls are set and released at a time of day, not at midnight, so a day is counted by the hour: a call setting at 4pm costs that day a third of its rate, not all of it. A call began or ended mid-day on 32 of these days.

This is paper water. It is the decreed rate that was in priority — not water that was physically in the stream, and not water this structure diverted. A ditch can be in priority for 50 cfs on a day the creek carries five. What that distinction means →

Legal record & documents

21 decreed actions on record across 13 court cases: 95CW0239, 20CW3078, 12CW0199, 93CW0178, 11CW0244, 93CW0179, 12CW0184, 19CW3140, 93CW0082, 21CW3183 and 3 more below.

148 imaged documents on DWR’s shelf for this structure — 144 water-court documents across 18 cases, including 18 decrees. Every row opens the scanned PDF at DWR. Listing as of 2026-09-07.

Imaged documents at DWR. DWR keeps the scanned documents for this structure — decrees, rulings, plats, correspondence — in its Laserfiche archive. Open the list directly: imaged documents for 0804097 ↗ (indexed by structure, not by case — the cases listed above appear within the list).

Other DWR records for this structure: DWR’s page for this structure ↗ — net amounts, water rights, transactions & adjudication history, and diversion records, all on that one page. On this site: the district’s full legal picture →

How often is it out of priority?

Across the 11 seasons whose call record is complete enough to judge this structure (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026), week by week from April.

Structures it shares court cases with

This structure was a party to 12 court cases that also touched 7 other structures — changes of water right, augmentation plans, exchanges. Being parties to the same case does not by itself mean water moved between them; which way it ran, and how much, is in the decree.

Also a party to 1 omnibus adjudication (05CW0111, 19 structures). Those settled many rights at once and are listed separately: they say these structures were adjudicated together, not that they deal with each other.

Recorded use (last 13 years on record)

Years far under the decreed amount? That gap has a name — paper water vs. wet water, explained on this structure.

In a median year this structure has a recorded diversion of 1,467 AF. Its most recent year on record, 2026, came in at 0 AF — 0% of that, and 1st lowest of the 13 years with a recorded volume.

Trends for this structure

Recorded use is falling over its last 13 recorded years (-170 AF/yr, Mann-Kendall p=0.004).

Its reference gage, Nevada Ditch to South Platte Reservoir: no clear flow trend.

Every gage and reach in this district →

How good is our record of it?

Grade A (9/10 points) — the components below are the finding; the letter alone is not.