“I lucked into my dream job,” Brad Kirby says. “I think I was meant to do what I do. I love managing water.”
Kirby grew up in the Tulelake basin, hunting, fishing, and exploring the wetlands, farms, and canals that comprise the vast former lake bed south of the Klamath Basin. Irrigation in the Klamath is a complex engineering system created over a hundred years ago by the Bureau of Reclamation. The Tulelake Irrigation District rests at the bottom of the system, with a complex matrix of canals and pumps that not only provide irrigation water from much higher up in the watershed but also capture excess water to be reused on fields. The task of managing that water in the most efficient manner possible falls to Kirby and his staff of pump crews and ditch riders.
