LOWER KENOSHA DITCH ☆ My Water

Structure dossier · WDID 8000712 · DITCH · KENOSHA CREEK · DWR record

In short

LOWER KENOSHA DITCH holds 1 decreed right on KENOSHA CREEK. We cannot judge whether its rights are in priority: this structure is not on the modelled flow network, so no reference gage can honestly stand in for it. In a median year over its last 3 recorded years it diverts 182 acre-feet.

Assembled from the figures on this page — every number above is checked against them before it is shown (3 checked). The detail, with its method, is in the cards below.

Current administration

● Fully called out — call at LAST CHANCE DITCH 2 (SOUTH PLATTE RIVER, priority 1863-12-30).

Which of its rights are out of priority?

Not computable for this structure: this structure is not on the modelled flow network, so no reference gage can honestly stand in for it.

Where it sits in line

Priority 1889-06-01 — 762nd most senior of the 21881 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: 2305540 (1889-05-31)☆. Immediately behind: NORTH BEAVER CREEK DITCH (1889-07-15)☆.

Decreed rights (1)

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 2.4 cfs decreed rate, the average day over the last 6 year(s) had 1.864 cfs in priority (78% of the decree). No call in effect is a free river — that was 6.4% of days.

On 77 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 33 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 →

The last 120 days

Legal record & documents

2 decreed actions on record across 2 court cases: W7936, CA1678.

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 8000712 ↗ (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

Also a party to 2 omnibus adjudications (CA1678, 151 structures; W7936, 29 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 3 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 182 AF. Its most recent year on record, 1976, came in at 40 AF — 22% of that, and 1st lowest of the 3 years with a recorded volume.

How good is our record of it?

Grade B (7/10 points) — the components below are the finding; the letter alone is not.