EVERETT — Although Washington issued a statewide drought declaration last week, Everett customers will likely not face challenges getting their drinking water during the drier summer and fall months, officials said.

But that doesn’t mean the region will not be impacted by the drought, the fourth declared within the state over the past four years. Ecosystems, fish and farmers across Snohomish County could face difficulties from a dry year thanks to the lack of snowpack in the mountainous areas of Washington following a warm winter.

Around 670,000 people in Snohomish County — three quarters of its population — gets their water from the Everett utility, which operates the Spada Reservoir along with the Snohomish County Public Utilities District, or PUD. The 50-billion-gallon reservoir provides drinking water for people, as well as for fish and power generation.

Even with the drought declaration, Everett’s drinking water supply is at a better point now than it was at this time last year, said Ryan Sass, the city’s public works director. That’s largely because of careful planning earlier in the season, combined with the sheer amount of storage the Spada Reservoir provides.

Managing the amount of water in the reservoir is a delicate business. Hold too much water, and it can overflow into a spillway without being put to productive use. Holding too little water risks not having enough for people, fish, or to generate electricity when the drier summer and fall months arrive.

In previous years, the city and the PUD would hold the reservoir a little bit lower during the winter months, allowing it to absorb runoff from snowpack higher in the Cascade mountains, said Andrew McDonnell, the PUD’s natural resources manager.

But as climate change contributes to warmer winters and more intense weather events, precipitation in the region is falling more often as rain than as snow.

“I think what we’re seeing in real time is climate change unfolding before us,” McDonnell said. “It’s been four years now we’ve had a drought and less snowpack, more of that precipitation falling as rain versus snow.”

The most recent winter between October 2025 and February 2026 was actually wetter than usual, the Department of Ecology wrote in its drought declaration. But December 2025 was also the warmest December on record, going back to 1895.

That means more rain, less snow. December’s historic rains wiped out most of the early winter snowpack, the Department of Ecology wrote. The decreased snowpack led to the agency declaring the statewide drought.

The feast and famine of intense rainfall followed by dry spells means the city and the PUD need to adjust the levels of the reservoir sure there is enough water for all of its uses, including for drinking, fish health and generating power. The PUD had to release water from the Spada Reservoir into a spillway — a built-in safety measure that allows water to flow out to protect the dam — in both December and March due to high precipitation levels in short periods of time.

This year, there is enough water stored in the reservoir that impacts to Everett’s customers are unlikely, a “fairly normal year” for the service area, Sass said. But if climate change intensifies in the coming years, the city and the PUD may need to weigh the three different priorities and begin to make difficult choices about where to best allocate the precious resource.

“If we head toward more extreme weather, or if we start having droughts that affect us like the rest of the state, then those operating parameters become more challenging, and there’ll be more sacrifices made,” Sass said.

As of late March, snowpack across the state was at its fourth lowest level in the past 40 years.

Snowpack is critical for Washington’s water supply, serving as natural storage for cool water. In normal years, it would gradually melt through the warmer months, supporting stream flows, farms and fish, said Caroline Mellor, the statewide drought lead at the Department of Ecology.

“But in these years when we have a snowpack drought, where we see a warm winter and we don’t build a good snowpack, that means the water is not being stored for when we need it the most,” Mellor said.

Although the large reservoirs like Spada Lake help protect the drinking water supply for people served by Everett’s water utility, the lack of snowpack can have negative effects on fish, stream flows and ecosystems around the region. Because freshwater fish need cooler temperatures to survive and are sensitive to temperature increases, warmer streams and rivers in the region could threaten species like salmon and steelhead, among others.

It could mean fish die in rivers and lead to multi-year impacts as fish aren’t able to complete their life cycles traveling between the ocean and the streams, Mellor said.

Higher outside temperatures in the summer and fall months aren’t the only way that the streams can be impacted. If there is less water in the streams due to lower snowpack, the temperatures of the streams will heat faster.

“If you make tea this morning, and you have less water in your tea kettle, it’s going to boil faster,” Mellor said. “The same thing applies in the river. If you have lower flows sooner or for a longer period of time, those lower flows are going to make that water warmer sooner, and that has major impacts for fish.”

At the Spada Reservoir, the PUD invested $13 million into a water temperature conditioning project, allowing the reservoir to release water from different elevations in the reservoir. Because water at the bottom of the reservoir is cooler — sometimes as much as about 60 degrees Fahrenheit cooler near the bottom compared to the top during summer months — releasing that cold water in the streams can help regulate the temperature of the Sultan River, McDonnell said.

The PUD is in the infancy stages of thinking about ways it can store even more water at the Spada Reservoir, as the changing conditions mean storing water, instead of making room for snowpack, will become more and more important as the climate continues to change.

Climate predictions show that this summer will likely be hotter and drier than normal, Mellor said, although how much hotter and drier it will be is unclear.

But the conditions this year may be a window into the new normal of a warming world. By 2050, Mellor said, the state expects to see snowpack droughts happen seven out of every ten years.

“We used to think of droughts as a one-off or an anomaly,” Mellor said. “But this is something that we should expect to see as part of who we are in Washington.”

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.

For tips on how to conserve water, visit snopud.com/save-energy/residential/water-conservation.