The Oregon Coast is getting to know drought

written by Daniel O’Neil | illustrations by Cate Andrews

It seems impossible to separate the Oregon Coast from rain. With the Coast Range serving as a moisture-trapping barrier to the east, the coastal communities feel amphibian, half-belonging to the Pacific source of all that precipitation. Countless streams and rivers, endless moss and lichen, and every shade of green—that’s the Oregon Coast, for most of the year, at least.

Despite receiving 6 or more feet of rain each year, Oregon’s coast has also begun to suffer from drought. The dry season tends to start earlier these days, sometimes lasting all spring and summer, and when it does, local inhabitants like fish, forests and farmers struggle. Water is a precious resource even on the “rainy” coast, it turns out, despite popular belief.

“When you’re dealing with levels of rain like in our community, it makes that messaging very challenging,” said Adam Denlinger, general manager of the Seal Rock Water District. “But in reality, we get the lion’s share of rain every year at a time when we don’t need it. And when we need it the most, that’s when we don’t get it.”

For the last decade, and especially over the past few years, water providers and consumers, local and state agencies, communities and nonprofits have worked collectively to find ways to conserve and respect water on the Oregon Coast. But their work is really just beginning.

For reasons related to profound influences like the Pacific Ocean and climate change, Oregon has been prone to drought over the last ten to fifteen years. Along the Oregon Coast, this new phenomenon has been most obvious when April showers fail to materialize. It might pour through fall and winter, but when spring is dry, and, naturally, so is summer, drought ensues.

In 2025, after a winter of normal rainfall, Oregon experienced one of the driest April-through-September periods on record, including along the coast. That summer provided a hint of the future as coastal rivers hit record lows and coastal water providers issued alerts.

“If you have a really wet winter, like November through March, normally we would expect that the following summer there will be no drought conditions, water supply will be ample, and the ecosystems will be good,” said Oregon state climatologist, and Oregon State University professor, Larry O’Neill. “But what we’re seeing is when we get these really dry springs, it sort of decouples the summer drought conditions from what happened during the previous winter.”

The trouble is that Oregon’s coastal landscape, from the crest of the Coast Range west to the shoreline, is not naturally equipped to buffer such conditions. The Coast Range itself, void of snowpack or deep aquifers, offers little in terms of water storage. Instead, the coast’s water supply—its river systems, which respond quickly to rain yet run low after only several weeks without it—depends on persistent and consistent precipitation throughout the wet season. Saturated soils play an important role in keeping Coast Range streams flowing, acting as sponges that recharge aquifers and contribute to stream flows when dry weather prevails.

So when drought sets in, and the ground dries up, streams shrink fast, which is exactly what happened in 2025. Following a month of little precipitation, stream gauges in the Coast Range showed a serious decline in flow by May, and by June record lows were being set.

“We’re starting to get more of this whiplash where the dry periods will be drier and the wet periods will be wetter, so it’s just more extremes on either end,” O’Neill said. “And what the climate models are really consistently showing now is that into the future we will get more precipitation during the winter and less during the spring and summer. Ideally we’d like the precipitation to be more spread out during the year, but the seasonality of the precipitation is going to increase”

Drought concerns Oregon’s entire coastal region, albeit in distinct ways. It affects the south coast, where warmer temperatures and less precipitation are a preexisting condition, differently than the north coast. Other factors, including snowpack-driven systems like the Rogue and Umpqua rivers, or agriculture, or sizable communities and water use in places like Newport, also contribute to how drought is altering ecosystems and ways of life along the coast.

One section of Oregon’s coast stands out in terms of drought—not just for its effects but largely due to the MidCoast response to water shortages and other water-related challenges. Lincoln County and environs have had drought on the radar for over a decade now. Water providers, water users, biologists and others here have all experienced or recorded the consequences of a changing coastal climate, and they have been part of the coast’s most unified response to the new, drier times.

Last summer, along with several counties in the very northeast corner of the state, the U.S. Drought Monitor showed northern Lincoln County and all of Tillamook County under “severe drought,” the worst in Oregon. Stream flows reached such worryingly low levels that Lincoln County petitioned the governor to declare a drought emergency, which was granted. (Coos County also had a drought declaration that year.) It allowed for loopholes in watermanagement rules and funding to help meet the needs of the county and its water users.

This wasn’t Lincoln County’s first declared drought—others were acknowledged by the governor in 2018 and 2023—but it did confirm the county’s fears that prolonged dry spells and low stream flows were a new feature on the landscape.

By July, as the Siletz River reported 20 percent of its average flow for that time of year, a new historic low, the City of Siletz declared emergency water restrictions, and the City of Newport issued a curtailment notice, asking its 4,600 customers to voluntarily conserve water. Both municipalities draw from the Siletz River.

Junior water rights were curtailed, affecting some farmers just when their crops needed water the most. The Lincoln Soil and Water Conservation District, a central figure in the county’s collaborative response to drought, had to relocate its Conservation Kayak events to estuaries because there wasn’t enough water in any of the river systems. “One of our floats, we actually rode the tide upriver because there was so little water that we could kayak up the Yaquina River for 4 miles,” said LSWCD Executive Director Tyler Clouse. “I think it was pretty shocking, but eye-opening, for people who came.”

Meanwhile, up and down the coast, populations swelled with the annual influx of summer tourists. Water demand responded as usual, doubling for the City of Newport from April to August. A recent study of Oregon Coast water use, led by David Rupp of OSU, showed how “local temperature was not a significant driver of variability in monthly water demand but that temperature in the Willamette Valley—the source of most tourists to the Oregon Coast—was.”

Still, coastal residents watered lawns, hotels did countless loads of laundry, vacation rentals filled hot tubs and industries like seafood processors drew all they needed from local river systems. Drought on the coast has certainly begun to affect people, including the agricultural community, which loses crops or is forced to pay exorbitant prices to have hay or water trucked over from the Willamette Valley. “From what I’m hearing from farmers and seeing here, I’m not aware of any of them that aren’t being challenged by the drought conditions that we’re experiencing,” said Evie Smith, OSU’s Small Farms and Community Horticulture extension agent for Lincoln County.

But, so far, the real casualties of coastal drought occur in the streams that salmon and steelhead call home. In Oregon, senior water rights (held by entities like municipal water providers and industry) have priority, leaving systems like the Siletz low and dry when drought settles in.

In low-flow, drought-driven summers, adult and juvenile salmonids struggle to survive in the warmer, less-oxygenated water, while some of their habitat simply vanishes into rock or mud. According to biologists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, abnormally low spring precipitation is creating the greatest impact on stream flow and therefore on fish. Such conditions don’t appear every year—2024 saw a wet spring, healthy streams and abundant salmon and steelhead returns, for example—but they’ve become more frequent in the last ten years or so as climate change has made itself apparent.

For Bob Rees, fishing guide and Northwest Guides and Anglers Association executive director, the many consequences of climate and human actions on the Chinook salmon fishery made his Tillamook-area business unsustainable. But drought, he said, was the nail in the coffin. “We had robust fisheries up until about ten years ago, and I think the effects of drought have been exacerbated in the last decade,” Rees said. “And it’s all related, as far as drought and water temperatures and what these fish can endure during a large portion of their life cycle. So there’s no doubt that drought is having an impact.”

For ODFW, drought along the coast, and elsewhere, represents just another manifestation of a changing climate. “[When talking about] some of the focus shift into habitat restoration and how we can start to look at the status of our habitats along the coast and in our coastal rivers—drought isn’t the direct cause of that focus necessarily, but it is intertwined in a lot of the work that we do,” said Dylan O’Keefe, an ODFW Mid-Coast District assistant fish biologist.

Partnerships with sovereign nations like the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and working relationships with senior water rights holders like the City of Newport and Georgia-Pacific, help keep water instream when the situation gets dire for fish in summer. New stream gauges assist, too, by providing everyone with real-time data. But a number of other factors influence the outcome of salmonids in coastal rivers, including conditions at sea and in Coast Range forestlands.

Christine Buhl is the state forest entomologist, but rather than talk about insects, she said she spends 90 percent of her time talking about climate change and drought. “I talk about drought because that’s what’s predisposing the insects,” she said.

Even Oregon’s coastal forests are suffering the consequences of a changed precipitation regime. According to Buhl, the frequency of drought seen along the coast is very apparent, partly because of trees’ susceptibility to rapid changes in climate. “Trees are a long-life species, so you can have a tree that’s growing along a stream and there’s still water, but it’s effectively in a drought because it’s not as much water as that tree was exposed to before.

“Additionally, trees need a long, slow drink of water, and if you get a major storm coming through in the Coast Range, which is happening more and more frequently, that’s just a huge dump of rain and a lot of that moisture washes off,” Buhl said. “It doesn’t even have time to percolate down to the roots of the tree.”

Dry spells especially affect trees in spring, when they are most actively growing. But hot, dry summers are also stressing trees beyond their limits, and die-offs of less drought-tolerant species such as Western red cedar, grand fir and even Douglas fir are occurring in coastal forests. Nefarious insects like spruce aphid are profiting from the warmth and the weakened trees, as are diseases like Swiss needle cast.

Forestry practices must adapt to these new threats, and they can do so with salmon in mind. For instance, by letting forests grow for longer, thirsty teenage trees will suck up less soil water over time. Older forests also contribute late-summer fog drip, which helps maintain soil moisture, and base stream flow, before the rains return in fall.

Water districts large and small all along the Oregon Coast are working to acquire their watersheds in order to maintain dense, mature forest canopies. Often, industrial forest companies have understood these needs and sold parcels for watershed conservation. Such collaboration between public utilities, private landowners, government agencies and other groups forms part of the place-based response to coastal drought that has most thoroughly coalesced in Lincoln County.

Solutions to drought are really just adaptations, because the changing climate isn’t going back to “normal.” And while drought is nothing new to much of the West, Oregon remains the only Western state without a state water planning process. To fill some of that void, in 2015 the Oregon Water Resources Department created a pilot program for place-based water planning. The agency selected four basins across the state and provided initial funding and technical support for them to identify key water resource issues and mitigation strategies.

The chosen basins are all in Eastern Oregon, except for Lincoln County. “The other pilots are more agricultural, with perhaps drier, more arid conditions, and they deal with water scarcity and conservation differently than what we do,” Denlinger said. “But that doesn’t mean that we don’t struggle with the same kind of conditions here.”

Collaboration between water providers, agencies, landowners, nonprofit groups and others forms the backbone of the initiative, which itself suffers from a drought of state funding. Money was granted for the planning process, but not for implementation.

Despite its challenges, the Mid-Coast Water Planning Partnership, formally recognized in 2022, now has thirty-seven active members and thirty-two charter signatories looking at how to plan for water supply in the future in order to meet the needs of people, ecosystems and the economy.

Clouse, of Lincoln Soil and Water Conservation District, is also a convener of the MCWPP. He said place-based planning has already helped to gather people who are working directly in water resources that otherwise might not cross paths often, like cities, private consultants and multiple county and state agencies. “We’ve got to work together,” he said. “If we don’t, it’s not going to work.”

As a senior water advisor at OWRD, Alyssa Mucken works with the MCWPP as they implement their action plan. She more than agrees with Clouse. “What we recognized as a state is that if we continue to try and solve our own individual problems, whether it be habitat, source water protection, in-stream flows, water for agriculture, we’re never going to get there,” she said. “The problem is just too big, and water is just too important of a resource.”

Besides contributing at a bureaucratic level, the MC-WPP is also already functioning on the ground and in MidCoast watersheds. Respect for water, and for one another, has grown as communities and municipalities have become more aware of their water-management conservation plans. “They’re looking at their stream flows, and they’re reaching out to me to come do random measurements just to make sure that their data is correct, that they’re following the instream water rights and the conditions on their permits,” said Nikki Hendricks, OWRD watermaster for District 1, which includes Lincoln County.

The Mid-Coast’s unified response to drought doesn’t end with the MCWPP. Other collaborative efforts, including the Mid-Coast Water Conservation Consortium and the Water Systems Alliance, have formed from the connections made over the last decade. Founded in 2021, the MCW-CC, a collective of water providers, is focused on promoting water conservation and improving resiliency to watersupply challenges.

Self-funded through contributions by the participating water providers, the MCWCC creates a variety of outreach materials that local water providers can use to reach businesses, residents and tourists with a unified message: Value and save water.

“A lot of these water providers, they provide water for businesses and residents, and then they also are concerned about the streams and the ecosystems,” said Suzanne de Szoeke, a water resources consultant with GSI Water Solutions, which works with the MCWPP and the MCWCC. “So it’s a holistic mission when they think about the value of conserving water. It helps benefit everyone by helping water go farther.”

The Seal Rock Water District serves a population of about 8,000 between Newport and Waldport. As a participant in the planning partnership and the conservation consortium, SRWD has installed a smart water grid system to monitor, and help consumers monitor, water usage at the tap. Today, SRWD uses less water than it did a decade ago, despite population growth.

SRWD general manager Denlinger recognizes the challenges of a changing climate and stresses the importance of valuing water all year long. “This is less about drought and more about the importance of protecting a precious resource,” he said.

The message of valuing, and therefore conserving, water needs to reach Salem as well, Denlinger added. “We also need to be educating our legislators, our state officials, on the value of water because we are behind in how we fund water improvements and fund major capital water infrastructure improvements in Oregon.”

Like a cold shower, or a lack of one, coastal drought serves as a wake-up call not just for Oregon’s coastal communities but for the state as a whole. If the rainy coast now needs to conserve water, where in Oregon doesn’t?

“Many times we make the mistake of placing the value of water on how much we spend for that water,” Denlinger said. “But that’s not really the value of water when you consider you can’t survive more than three days without it.”