STARVATION
Built to replace water that leaves the basin
Reclamation disagrees with itself about how tall this dam is, how long its crest is and how much it holds. Two federal websites give the reservoir a fifth of its real surface area. And Utah turns out to have two dams named Starvation.
Two Reclamation web pages describe the same structure. They disagree about its height, its crest length and its capacity, and the dam inventory disagrees with both.
| Measure | Reclamation's dam data sheet | Reclamation's project pages | The dam inventory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Height | Structural 200.3 ft, hydraulic 162.0 | "155 feet high", and the project history says "rising 155 feet above the stream bed" | Dam height 210, structural 200, hydraulic 139 |
| Crest length | 3,070.0 ft | "2,920 feet long at the crest" | 3,070 |
| Capacity | 167,300 acre feet, and Interior prints 167,310 | Normal 165,320, maximum 186,990 | |
| Dam type | Zoned earthfill | Rolled earthfill, and the project history says zoned, rolled earthfill | Earth |
| Spillway capacity | 16,000 cfs at elevation 5,718.3 | 16,600 |
What everyone agrees on: it is an earthfill dam on the Strawberry River, three miles northwest of Duchesne , finished in 1970, and it took 483,600 cubic yards of material . The contract went to Goodfellow Brothers, Inc. of Wenatchee, Washington on 7 March 1967 on a low bid of 8,182,750 dollars, groundbreaking was 31 May 1967, embankment placement finished in August 1969 and the coffer dam was breached on 10 November 1969 . On the name, Reclamation offers only this: "The unusual name for the dam and reservoir is believe to have originated with the cattlemen and homesteaders that attempted to settle the area" , typo included.
Starvation is on the Strawberry River, and so is Strawberry Reservoir, upstream. That sounds like a simple chain. It is not, and the difference is the reason this dam was built.
Strawberry Reservoir is the collecting point of an export. The Strawberry Aqueduct and Collection System gathers ten tributaries, including Rock Creek, Hades Creek, Wolf Creek, the West Fork of the Duchesne, Currant Creek and the Strawberry River itself, and carries them 36.8 miles into Strawberry Reservoir . From there the water goes west, out of the Colorado River basin entirely and into the Bonneville basin on the other side of the Wasatch. Diversions average 101,900 acre feet a year .
The export is old. Reclamation calls the Strawberry Valley Project "the first large-scale transmountain diversion from the Colorado River Basin to the Bonneville Basin", and the tunnel that did it was dug between 1906 and 1912, seven feet wide and nine feet high, 3.8 miles long, rated at 600 cubic feet a second . Strawberry Reservoir was later enlarged from 273,000 acre feet to 1,106,500 .
So the honest statement is longer than the short one. Strawberry Reservoir is upstream of Starvation on the same river, in the same hydrologic unit, and the gauge ladder runs continuously between them . But a large and variable share of the water Strawberry collects never comes down this river at all. Anyone reading the two as a simple upstream and downstream pair will get the hydrology of this basin wrong. Water reaching Starvation also arrives sideways: Knight Diversion Dam on the Duchesne River, finished in 1968, can push 300 cubic feet a second into this reservoir through the Starvation Feeder Conduit, a mile of tunnel and nearly another mile of pipeline .
Both the Department of the Interior and the Central Utah Project office carry the same sentence, word for word: "At full pool, the reservoir covers about 689 surface acres."
| Surface area | Source |
|---|---|
| 3,310 acres | The national dam inventory |
| 3,291 acres | The federal water body dataset at medium resolution, 13.32 square kilometres |
| 2,992 acres | The same dataset at high resolution, 12.106 square kilometres |
| 689 acres | Interior, and the project office, identically |
The federal water body dataset also disagrees with itself: its medium resolution layer gives 13.32 square kilometres and its high resolution layer gives 12.106, for the same reach code and the same feature identifier . That is a ten percent difference between two versions of one dataset, and it is an ordinary consequence of resolution rather than an error. The 689 is a different kind of number.
The national inventory record for this dam, UT10136 :
| Field | What it says |
|---|---|
| Hazard potential | High |
| Condition assessment | Not Available, with the assessment date field empty |
| Last inspection | 8 September 2021, inspection frequency 4 years |
| Emergency action plan | The prepared flag is empty and the last revised date reads 17 June 2020 |
| Purposes | Irrigation, and nothing else, on a reservoir with a state park, a municipal water treatment plant and a managed fishery |
| Years modified | Empty |
| Record last updated | 22 October 2025 |
The purposes field is under inclusive on the agencies' own evidence: the project office describes this system as serving irrigation and municipal use, as well as providing flood control, recreation, and fish and wildlife benefits . The inventory's congressional representative field is not printed on this page, because it names a representative who left Congress in January 2021 and attaches him to the wrong district number in the same record .
A search of the national dam inventory for every dam in the country whose name contains Starvation returns six, in two states . Four are flood detention dams in Luna County, New Mexico. Two are in Utah.
| This reservoir | The other one | |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory identifier | UT10136, Starvation Dam | UT00199, Starvation Canyon |
| County | Duchesne | San Juan, near Blanding |
| Owner | Federal, Bureau of Reclamation | Local government, state regulated |
| Height | 200 to 210 ft | 34 ft |
| Storage | 186,990 acre feet | 677 acre feet |
| Finished | 1970 | 1985 |
The federal water body dataset was cleaner. A wildcard search on the name returns six reservoirs and lakes in five states, but an exact query on "Starvation Reservoir" returns one feature in the entire country . The trap here is in the dam inventory, not the water body dataset, which is the reverse of what happened on the last page.
0.920 milligrams a kilogram, on ten walleye
The highest single mercury figure in either of Utah's summary tables, more than three times the screening value. And the state's own advisory list does not agree with the document it links to about how many species are covered.
Utah's health department sampled four species at Starvation in 2021 and published the results in June 2023. The measure is mercury in fish fillet tissue, wet weight, in milligrams a kilogram. The comparison line is stated in the document itself: "Mean mercury concentrations in fish fillet tissues were compared to EPA's screening value (SV) for mercury of 0.3 mg/kg" .
| Species | Fish sampled | Mean mg/kg | Range | Std dev | Over the screening value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Walleye | 10 | 0.920 | 0.2 to 2 | 0.6 | Yes |
| Smallmouth bass | 11 | 0.584 | 0.4 to 0.8 | 0.1 | Yes |
| Yellow perch | 11 | 0.270 | 0.2 to 0.4 | 0.08 | No |
| Rainbow trout | 10 | 0.084 | 0.04 to 0.2 | 0.08 | No |
The meal limits. These are maximum meals per month, at 8 ounces of uncooked fish per meal, which the document states explicitly . WCB means women of childbearing age, 16 to 50. PW means pregnant and breastfeeding women.
| Species | General public | Women of childbearing age, children 6 to 16 | Pregnant and breastfeeding women, children under 6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walleye | 3 | 1 | Do not eat |
| Smallmouth bass | 6 | 2 | Do not eat |
Starvation is the most restricted water in that table. Five water bodies appear in it and nine rows between them. Starvation is the only one where both of its listed species carry a do not eat instruction for pregnant women and children under six, and its walleye limit of three meals a month is the tightest general public figure in the table except for Newcastle's small wiper at four . Steinaker Reservoir has three species listed, more than any other, but none at Starvation's concentrations.
The health department's current advisory page lists twelve Utah waters, each linking to its own advisory sheet. The link for this one reads, exactly: "Starvation Reservoir - Smallmouth bass" .
One species. The June 2023 technical document, which that same page also links to, gives two, with separate meal limits for each .
Two smaller things about the same page. The list is framed as a 2022 mercury analysis while the technical document says 2021 sampling data throughout . And no advisory update newer than June 2023 could be found anywhere, so nothing establishes that Starvation's status has changed since.
The environmental department keeps a separate contaminant advisory list, and Starvation Reservoir, Duchesne County is on it, with no species and no contaminant shown, on a page whose own footer says it was last updated on 20 April 2018 . Three state pages, three different amounts of detail, and the most detailed one is the oldest by nothing and the least detailed one is the newest.
The shape at the top of this page was traced by hand for a print, then measured against the USGS water body polygon on its own coordinates, converted from web map metres to true metres by the cosine of the latitude.
| Measure | Traced outline | Federal polygon | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proportion, width over height | 1.351 | 1.415 | 4.5 percent |
| Area, stretched to fill on both axes | 3,094 acres | 3,027 acres | 2.2 percent large |
| Area, matched on height | 2,955 acres | 3,027 acres | 2.4 percent small |
| Area, matched on width | 3,239 acres | 3,027 acres | 7.0 percent large |
An honest note on the method here. The federal ring used for this measurement was a simplified version of the polygon, because the full one is too long to retrieve in a single request. Running the shoelace formula over it gives 12.25 square kilometres against the dataset's published 12.106, so the simplification is inflating the area by about 1.2 percent . The proportion figures are barely affected by that; the area figures should be read as good to about a percent, not better. Traced from OpenStreetMap geometry under the Open Database License, and that credit travels with any public use of the shape.
No maximum depth, mean depth or shoreline length is published for this reservoir by anyone. Not Reclamation, not the dam inventory, not the water body dataset, not Utah State Parks. The one depth like number that reached print is incidental: news coverage of the 2024 vehicle recovery put that vehicle at about fifty feet down , which is a single point and not a maximum.
The finding comes from an unlikely document. A draft discharge permit for the Duchesne Valley Water Treatment Plant, which sits on the east side of this reservoir and takes its raw water from it, states verbatim :
"According to the Utah 2024 303(d) Water Quality Assessment Report, the receiving water for the discharge; Starvation Reservoir (UT-L-14060004-006_00) is impaired for dissolved oxygen and temperature."
And immediately after: "Although a TMDL study has not been completed to address these impairments, instantaneous sampling for both dissolved oxygen and temperature has been added to the Permit monitoring requirements to support any future study efforts."
The same document settles a classification question two other sources disagreed about. It quotes the rule directly: Starvation is Class 1C, protected for domestic use after treatment; 2A, protected for frequent primary contact recreation including swimming and water skiing; 3A, cold water game fish; and 4, agricultural use . A second, separately hosted reproduction of the rule agrees . The federally hosted copy of Utah's standards returned 2B, 3A, 4 instead , which would be the lower recreation tier and no domestic protection at all. Two sources against one, and the two include Utah's own current permit paperwork, so this page uses 1C, 2A, 3A, 4 and records that the third exists.
Also from that permit: discharges here are under Colorado River salinity control, limited to one ton a day of total dissolved solids or 366 tons a year . That is a reminder of which side of the divide this water is on. Two 2025 monitoring visits found no visible signs of a harmful algal bloom, on 18 June and 22 July , and no advisory of any level has ever been found for this reservoir, though the full history could not be retrieved.
The reservoir card at the top of this page reads from station 09UT02JJ:UT:BOR, the soil conservation service's record . The water survey has its own lake site for the same water, numbered 09288395, and it is published as "STARVATON RESERVOIR NEAR DUCHESNE, UT" .
The soil conservation service record publishes three durations, and they begin in three different decades :
| Duration | Record begins | What a value object actually contains |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | 1 October 1970 | month, year, value. No date, and the service flags it as derived |
| Daily | 1 October 1976 | date and value. Not flagged as derived |
| Semimonthly | 4 October 2017 | month, monthPart, year, value. No date, and monthPart is a string where the others are integers |
Code written for the daily shape and pointed at either of the others matches nothing, gets an empty list, and reports a timeout that never happened. The card at the top of this page reads the daily duration and checks for a date key before it trusts a row. And note the six year gap: the record starts in 1970 but the daily record does not, so a daily series from this station is not a fifty five year record.
The inflow gauge is the good one. 09288180, Strawberry River near Duchesne, drains 917 square miles, has recorded discharge since 1 May 1968, and carries a water quality record that begins on 9 June 1948 and runs to 2024, with major ions from the 1940s, nutrients, metals and suspended sediment . That is the richest single record in this basin.
Snow is the other gap. Four snow telemetry stations sit in this river basin and three of them are in Wasatch County, above Strawberry Reservoir . Their snowpack feeds the collection system, and a large share of what they measure leaves the basin before it could ever reach here. The nearest one that is genuinely tributary to Starvation is Wilbur Bench, at 9,170 feet in Duchesne County. No snow station sits in the reservoir's own sub basin.
Where everything is
Nine places, a park renamed for a man while the reservoir kept its own name, and one pin that is deliberately the wrong reservoir.
The official name of the park is Fred Hayes State Park at Starvation. The water body is still Starvation Reservoir, and Reclamation, the wildlife division, the environmental department and the national dam inventory all still call it that .
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Hours | Summer 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.; winter 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. |
| Campgrounds | The park describes four primitive and two developed campgrounds . The reservation contractor lists seven named areas: Indian Bay, Rabbit Gulch West, Rabbit Gulch East, Juniper Point, Knight Hollow, Lower Beach and Mountain View |
| Sites | 135 in total: 63 partial hookup, 23 standard, 24 primitive, 5 full hookup, 5 group, 6 picnic cabana, 4 cabins, 4 boat slips, 1 cottage |
| Season | Open year round |
| Other | Off highway vehicle trails, a 3D archery range, slacklines, disc golf and geocaching |
Do not trust a percentage full from any single page, including this one. At the time of writing the park page reported the reservoir at 87 percent and receding on a day when the federal storage station read 104,947 acre feet , which is 63 percent of Reclamation's capacity and 56 percent of the dam inventory's maximum. No published capacity produces 87 percent from that reading. The card at the top of this page shows its arithmetic and names its denominator. The park publishes no coordinate, no elevation, no acreage and no opening year; the pin on the map above is the reservation contractor's .
The Strawberry River rises west of here, is impounded twice, and joins the Duchesne River at the town of Duchesne. The Duchesne joins the Green, and the Green joins the Colorado. This is the Colorado side of the divide, which is why the discharge permit on this reservoir carries a salinity limit .
| Point | Elevation | Drainage |
|---|---|---|
| Strawberry Reservoir | About 7,600 ft | 170 sq mi at its gauge |
| Strawberry River near Soldier Springs | 7,360 ft | 213 sq mi |
| Strawberry River at the Pinnacles | 6,052 ft | 362 sq mi |
| Strawberry River near Duchesne, the inflow | 5,725 ft | 917 sq mi |
| Starvation Reservoir | 5,712 ft at the gauge, full pool 5,718.3, dam crest 5,725 | 1,055 to 1,058 sq mi |
| Strawberry River below the dam | 5,540 ft | 1,059 sq mi |
| Strawberry River at Duchesne, the mouth | 5,512 ft | 1,066 sq mi |
The dam is three miles northwest of Duchesne by Reclamation's account , three miles by the dam inventory's , two and a half by the wildlife division's , and the weather service resolves the dam point as "3 Miles WNW Duchesne UT". Those agree to within half a mile. No geological map specific to this reservoir or this river was found; the Duchesne 30 by 60 minute quadrangle mapping covers the region, and the parts of it described sit east of here around Roosevelt and the oil and gas fields .
Strawberry Reservoir is the one this page has to be careful about, and there is a section on it under About. The rest are related by rule and by advisory rather than by water.
| Water | What is actually shared |
|---|---|
| Steinaker | Both. It sits immediately after Starvation on the page 20 spearfishing bass closure list , and it is the only other water in the June 2023 update table with multiple species and a do not eat tier, with three species listed |
| Rockport | Both. Immediately before Starvation on the same closure list , and on the current mercury advisory list for smallmouth bass, at 0.699 milligrams a kilogram, the closest comparator to Starvation's smallmouth |
| Echo | Both. Third on the closure list , and the only other water on the current advisory list with a two species mercury advisory |
| Pelican Lake | On the current mercury advisory list for bluegill and largemouth bass , and the other Uinta Basin water in this series |
| Red Fleet, East Canyon, Deer Creek, Flaming Gorge | All on the page 20 closure list with Starvation . Deer Creek is also named alongside it in the dead yellow perch bait sentence |
Nine species, and the state has spent seventeen years watching three of them try to leave
In 2007 the wildlife division recommended against screening the spillway. By 2023 it had installed one and credited it with declining walleye numbers in the Green River.
Walleye
The fish this page is about. Mean mercury 0.920 milligrams a kilogram on ten fish, the highest single figure in either of the state's summary tables, with a range running to 2.0. Three meals a month for the general public, one for women of childbearing age, none for pregnant women or children under six.
0.920 mg/kg. 3 meals a monthSmallmouth bass
The other species under advisory, at 0.584 on eleven fish, nearly double the screening value. Six meals a month, two, and none. It is also the species the state has spent seventeen years trying to keep from escaping downstream.
0.584 mg/kg. 6 meals a monthYellow perch
Measured at 0.270, just under the 0.3 screening value, so it carries no meal limit. It is one of the three species the 2007 escapement study tracked through the spillway, and dead yellow perch may legally be used as bait here.
0.270 mg/kg. Below the screening valueRainbow trout
The cleanest fish in the survey at 0.084, a tenth of the walleye figure. Stocked, and named by Utah State Parks among the species anglers target here.
0.084 mg/kg. The cleanest hereBrown trout
Not sampled for mercury here. In the 2007 escapement study it was the most numerous fish pulled out of the stilling basins, between 120 and 349 in a single draining event.
Most numerous in the 2007 studyCutthroat trout
Named by Utah State Parks in the fishery and recorded in the 2007 escapement study. No mercury figure exists for it at this reservoir.
Named by the state parkKokanee salmon
Planted experimentally in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and Utah State Parks says they "have done well". No monitoring report exists to say how well.
Planted 2016 to 2018Utah chub
Forage, and one of the species the 2007 study counted in the stilling basins, from 2 to 139 per draining. What the walleye and the bass are eating.
ForageCommon carp
Named by Utah State Parks in the same sentence as the game fish. The 2007 study took between 2 and 230 of them out of the basins in a single event.
In the stilling basinsThe best document about this fishery is not about fishing. It is a 2007 wildlife division study of what escapes over the dam, funded by the federal programme that is trying to recover endangered fish in the Colorado River, by Ronald E. Brunson, Kevin D. Christopherson and Trina N. Hedrick .
They drained the spillway and outlet stilling basins and counted everything in them, over 2002 to 2005, using seines, boat electrofishing, gill nets, fyke nets, trammel nets and a block net weir below the spillway. The finding, verbatim: "Smallmouth bass, walleye, and yellow perch are escaping from Starvation Reservoir" .
| Species | Escapement rate, 2005 | Estimated annual average, 1985 to 2006 |
|---|---|---|
| Smallmouth bass | 0.0028 fish per acre foot | 14 fish |
| Walleye | 0.0005 | 3 fish |
| Yellow perch | 0.0006 | 3 fish |
Those are small numbers, and the study said so: "all three species are escaping from the reservoir at a rate of less than 0.01 fish/AF", and "Starvation Reservoir escapement rates are an order of magnitude smaller than those observed at Elkhead Reservoir" . Its recommendation was equally plain: "Do not screen the spillway of Starvation Reservoir", and "Take no management action in the outlet basin".
This is a policy reversal, not a contradiction to be resolved. Both documents are the wildlife division's. In 2007 the escapement looked too small to be worth screening. By 2023 the same agency was writing that "the predators in the system, namely Walleye and Smallmouth Bass, are problematic if and when they escape the reservoir" and that walleye "can move through riverine habitats, consume large quantities of other fishes" . What changed is what was happening downstream in the Green River, not what was happening here.
The 2007 study is also the only real species inventory this reservoir has. Besides the three target species it recorded brown trout, mountain whitefish, green sunfish, carp, Utah chub, white sucker, mountain sucker, rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, black bullhead, channel catfish and largemouth bass . It also noticed that fish in the outlet basin looked like the cold water Strawberry River community while fish in the spillway basin looked like the cool water Duchesne River community downstream, which is a neat piece of evidence about where each set of fish came from.
No wildlife division fishery monitoring report for Starvation Reservoir could be found. The naming convention that works for other waters was tried at three filenames and all three returned nothing. So there is no published catch rate, no length or weight distribution and no relative weight figure for any species in this reservoir.
What the state does publish about the fishery it publishes on the park page: "Starvation Reservoir is one of the premier walleye fisheries in the state with numerous larger fish over 10 pounds being pulled from its clear waters each year", and "four or more fishing tournaments are held annually with the Walleye Classic being the most popular" . Its species line reads "Smallmouth Bass, Yellow Perch, Rainbow Trout, Brown Trout, Cutthroat Trout, carp, and a few chubs", which does not include walleye, two sentences before it calls this a premier walleye fishery.
The same project record does say something worth having. It describes this reservoir as "home to naturally reproducing walleye, smallmouth bass and yellow perch" . That is the division stating in its own record that the three nonnative predators here reproduce on their own rather than depending on stocking. The project itself, to build forage fish habitat, was put on hold pending a memorandum of understanding and had not been installed as of the record.
No agency document found here says any species in Starvation was illegally introduced. The division calls walleye and smallmouth bass nonnative, and naturally reproducing, and never uses the word illegal about this water . A November 2025 news story about fish illegally introduced into a Utah reservoir in the Colorado River drainage is about Loyds Lake in San Juan County and is not this water. Also not found: any Utah state record fish tied to Starvation, and any current regional fishing forecast that names it.
Starvation Reservoir has no entry of its own in the rules for specific waters. Statewide general limits apply. It appears in the 2026 guidebook twice: on the page 20 seasonal bass spearfishing closure, tenth of eleven waters between Rockport and Steinaker, and in the dead yellow perch bait sentence .
Getting to that answer took five reads, and two of them were fabrications.
| Read | What it produced | How it was caught |
|---|---|---|
| Fabrication 1 | A Starvation entry reading "Limit 4 trout or kokanee salmon (a combined total)", with Steed Pond listed before it | The alphabetical order test. Steed sorts after Starvation, so the list was not a list |
| Fabrication 2 | A completely different Starvation entry reading "Limit 6 bass", on page 38, with neighbours in correct alphabetical order | The order test passed. It was caught only by asking a separate, strictly worded yes or no question about whether the heading exists |
And there is no external cross check for these rules. Utah's water by water fishing limits are set by proclamation and published in the guidebook, and no independent reproduction of them could be obtained, which confirms the same negative recorded on the last page in this series. Verify against the current guidebook before relying on any of it . Separately, the wildlife division proposed on 12 August 2026 a protective slot limit for walleye here, a spearfishing closure for walleye, and bowfishing with a seasonal closure . Those are proposals for 2027 and 2028, not current rules, and this page does not print them as such.
What to watch for
Three recoveries on the public record, and not one account that says how any of them was made.
Fathom tracks one detail across this series that most reports leave out: whether a body was found by divers or by sonar. On this reservoir, three recoveries are on the public record and not one source states a method for any of them.
| When | What happened | Method stated |
|---|---|---|
| April 2019 | A man in his seventies from Spanish Fork slipped while shore fishing near the Freedom Bridge, "rolled several feet down the bank and into the water". The county sheriff and a state parks ranger responded. He was pronounced dead at the scene | Not stated |
| September 2024 | A submerged vehicle located about fifty feet down, with remains inside, linked to a man missing since June 2004 and confirmed by DNA in February 2025. A nonprofit search organisation, two county sheriffs, the state natural resources department and state parks were involved | Not stated |
| March 2026 | A 67 year old Salt Lake County man, reported missing after no contact since Sunday, recovered at about noon on the Thursday, without a life jacket. The state natural resources law enforcement division, the county sheriff and a neighbouring county's search and rescue team responded | Not stated |
Two of the three accounts also disagree with themselves on dates. The state parks notice on the 2019 death is dated 18 April and the news account puts it on Thursday 19 April at about 3:40 p.m. . The 2024 recovery is described as happening on a Monday in an October 2024 report and as September 2024 in the February 2025 follow up . No agency compilation of incidents at this reservoir exists, so these are three separately sourced events and not a count.
- The 2026 recovery is the only one where a life jacket is mentioned, and it is mentioned because there was not one .
- One main boat ramp, reported open at the time of writing . Conditions here change; check the park page before you tow.
- Mussels are not recorded here. The wildlife division states Utah's confirmed infestation "is currently limited to Lake Powell", and this reservoir is named nowhere on that page . The statewide programme still applies: the annual mussel aware boater course with proof in the launch vehicle, enrolment for motorised vessels, stopping at every operating inspection station, and clean, drain and dry.
- The reservoir is drawn on by a municipal treatment plant on its east side , which is part of why it carries a domestic water classification.
Could not be found:
- Maximum depth, mean depth and shoreline length, from any agency.
- Whether the current mercury advisory covers one species or two. The document that would settle it is an image file with no readable text .
- Any mercury advisory update newer than June 2023, from anywhere .
- Any fishery monitoring report for this reservoir, at three filename patterns that work for other waters.
- Any state record fish, or confirmation of Blue Ribbon status .
- Park fees, hours beyond the two lines published, coordinates, elevation, acreage or opening year .
- The full harmful algal bloom history. Only two 2025 visits were retrievable, both clear .
- The current assessment category beyond the impairment quoted in the discharge permit. The federal assessment interface returned an authorisation error on every call .
- Any geological mapping specific to this reservoir or the Strawberry River .
- Active discharge data below the dam. That gauge stopped in 1994 .
Pregnant women and children under six are told not to eat the walleye or the smallmouth bass from this reservoir at all.
Fathom Restoration is a Utah 501(c)(3) that runs volunteer dive cleanups and is built to pull what does not belong out of Utah water, statewide.
Donate to Protect StarvationEvery figure on this page is quoted from the source named beside it.
Sources
How these were checked
Numbered sources are agencies. Lettered sources are everything else, and on this page they carry a second reproduction of the water classification rule, the park site counts, and the three incident accounts. Four things did not survive checking. Two fishing guidebook entries for this reservoir were fabricated, giving contradictory limits, and one of the two passed the alphabetical order test that has caught every previous fabrication in this series; it was caught only by a separate existence question. An assertion that divers made the 2024 recovery had no supporting sentence in any source and is not published. The 689 acre surface area published identically on two federal websites is irreconcilable with every other agency figure and with the capacity on the same page. And the park's reported 87 percent full could not be reproduced from the federal storage reading against any published capacity. Where agencies disagree, all of them are printed: that happens over the dam's height, its crest length, its capacity, its type, its spillway capacity, the reservoir's surface area, its beneficial use class, and how many fish species its mercury advisory covers.Starvation Dam data. Central Utah Project, Bonneville Unit. A zoned earthfill dam three miles northwest of Duchesne, structural height 200.3 feet, hydraulic height 162, crest length 3,070 feet at elevation 5,725, spillway 16,000 cubic feet a second, 483,600 cubic yards of material
Central Utah Project, Bonneville Unit. A rolled earthfill structure 155 feet high and 2,920 feet long, capacity 167,300 acre feet, construction begun 1966
The Central Utah Project, Bonneville Unit, historic projects book. The 1956 authorising act, the contractor and the low bid, the construction sequence, the origin of the name, and the sentence explaining what Starvation was built to do
National Inventory of Dams, Starvation Dam, federal identifier UT10136. Hazard potential high, condition assessment not available with no assessment date, last inspected 8 September 2021 on a four year cycle, and three mutually inconsistent heights in one record
National Inventory of Dams, every dam in the country whose name contains Starvation. Six of them, in two states, and two of the six are in Utah
National Hydrography Dataset, Starvation Reservoir, GNIS 01434779, reach code 14060004001061. The polygon this page measures its outline against, and the one whose area the two resolutions of the dataset disagree about
Starvation Collection System. A capacity of 167,310 acre feet, a surface area of about 689 acres, and the statement that releases replace water transferred to other basins
Starvation Collection System. Knight Diversion Dam, completed 1968, diverting up to 300 cubic feet a second into the reservoir through the Starvation Feeder Conduit
Fish mercury consumption advisories, June 2023. The sample sizes, means, ranges and standard deviations for four species at Starvation, the screening value they are measured against, and the meal limits
Game and fish advisories. The current list of twelve waters, on which Starvation is written as a one species water
Contaminant fish advisories. Starvation Reservoir, Duchesne County, is on the list with no species or contaminant shown, on a page last updated in April 2018
Draft discharge permit UT0025801, Duchesne Valley Water Treatment Plant, public notice fact sheet. The beneficial use classification quoted from the rule, the assessment unit identifier, the impairment finding, and the statement that no load allocation has been completed
Approved total maximum daily loads. Starvation Reservoir does not appear on the list
Starvation Reservoir recreational monitoring. Two 2025 visits, both finding no visible signs of a bloom
Utah water quality standards, classification of waters of the state. The reproduction that gives Starvation a different class from the one Utah's own permit paperwork quotes
Starvation Reservoir storage, station 09UT02JJ:UT:BOR, at 5,720 feet. Monthly from October 1970, daily only from October 1976, semimonthly only from October 2017
Reservoir lake site 09288395, published as STARVATON RESERVOIR NEAR DUCHESNE, UT. Inactive, with storage recorded only from May 1989 to October 1994
Strawberry River below Starvation Reservoir, site 09288400. Drainage area 1,059 square miles. Discharge from June 1989 to October 1994 and nothing since
Strawberry River near Duchesne, site 09288180. The inflow gauge. Drainage area 917 square miles, discharge since 1 May 1968, and a water quality record beginning 9 June 1948
Snow telemetry and reservoir stations in the Strawberry basin, hydrologic unit 14060004. Four snow stations, three of them above Strawberry Reservoir in another county
Evaluation of nonnative fish escapement from Starvation Reservoir, 23 January 2007, by Ronald E. Brunson, Kevin D. Christopherson and Trina N. Hedrick. The species, the escapement rates, and the recommendation not to screen the spillway
Watershed Restoration Initiative project 6778, Starvation Spillway Screen. The temporary screen, the permanent one being designed, the rotenone treatment after each spill, and the claim about walleye numbers in the Green River
Watershed Restoration Initiative project 5963, Starvation Reservoir forage fish habitat enhancement. Naturally reproducing walleye, smallmouth bass and yellow perch, and a Blue Ribbon claim
Blue Ribbon fisheries. The programme is described, four waters are named on the page, and Starvation is not one of them
2026 Utah Fishing Guidebook. Starvation appears twice, on the page 20 seasonal bass spearfishing closure list and in the dead yellow perch bait sentence, and has no entry of its own in the rules for specific waters
Recommended changes to fishing regulations, 12 August 2026. Proposed walleye slot limits at Starvation, a proposed spearfishing closure for walleye, and proposed bowfishing. Proposals, not current rules
Fred Hayes State Park at Starvation. The hours, the campgrounds, the park manager and the live conditions
Fishing at Fred Hayes State Park at Starvation. The species list, the experimental kokanee plantings of 2016 to 2018, and the description of the walleye fishery
Man drowns at Fred Hayes State Park at Starvation, 18 April 2019
Invasive quagga and zebra mussels. Utah's confirmed infestation is limited to Lake Powell, and Starvation is not named
Strawberry Valley Project. The first large scale transmountain diversion from the Colorado River basin to the Bonneville basin, and the tunnel that made it, dug from 1906 to 1912
Strawberry Aqueduct and Collection System. Ten tributaries gathered into a 36.8 mile aqueduct, and an average of 101,900 acre feet a year sent out of this basin
Duchesne County geologic publications. The Duchesne 30 by 60 minute quadrangle mapping, and nothing specific to this reservoir or this river
Utah Administrative Code R317-2-13, classification of waters. The second reproduction this page used, and it agrees with Utah's own permit paperwork rather than with the federally hosted copy
Fred Hayes State Park at Starvation facility details. One hundred and thirty five campsites, the seven named areas, and the only published coordinate for the park
Authorities identify man who drowned Thursday after falling into Starvation Reservoir, April 2019
Body in vehicle recovered in Starvation Reservoir after 20 years missing, 1 October 2024, and the February 2025 identification
Nonprofit's extensive search leads to vehicle being recovered from Utah reservoir with body inside, 1 October 2024. The only account that describes the search method at all, and it describes it only as underwater
Missing man's body recovered at Starvation Reservoir, 19 March 2026. The agencies that responded
Which capacity figure this percentage uses
The percentage divides the storage reading by 167,300 acre feet. That is the figure on Reclamation's Bonneville Unit page and in its project history . It is arithmetic on the reading beside it, not a separate measurement.
Four capacities are published for this reservoir: 167,300 from Reclamation, 167,310 from Interior and the project office , 165,320 as normal storage in the national dam inventory and 186,990 as its maximum . The first three are within one percent of each other. The choice between 167,300 and 186,990 moves this percentage by about seven points, which is why the denominator is named here.
Do not compare this number to the one on the park page. At the time of writing that page reported 87 percent on a day the federal station read 104,947 acre feet . That is 63 percent of Reclamation's capacity and 56 percent of the inventory's maximum. No published capacity yields 87.
The storage record starts in October 1970 , but the daily series only begins in October 1976 and the semimonthly one in 2017. This card reads the daily series, so it is a fifty year record and not a fifty five year one.
The flow card is the inflow, not the outflow. USGS 09288180, Strawberry River near Duchesne, draining 917 square miles . The gauge below this dam, 09288400, stopped reporting in October 1994 , so current releases from Starvation are not published by the water survey at all.