--- title: "Forty-One Cloud-Seeding Contracts. Not One Of Them Pays For Rain." dek: "Every payment term is in flight hours, flares expended or generator-hours run. Thirty-eight promise only that operations were conducted to the suspension criteria. Operators stood down 38 per cent of eligible hours and were paid for standing by." kind: news (News) desk: Suppressed Science author: Dr. Ilse Vantongeren and Harriet Kwon-Massey (fictional) published: 2026-08-21T06:30:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/no-rainfall-clause tags: cloud seeding, weather modification, procurement, water districts, Colorado genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Forty-One Cloud-Seeding Contracts. Not One Of Them Pays For Rain. *Every payment term is in flight hours, flares expended or generator-hours run. Thirty-eight promise only that operations were conducted to the suspension criteria. Operators stood down 38 per cent of eligible hours and were paid for standing by.* Forty-one live cloud-seeding contracts. Not one of them makes a payment conditional on precipitation. Every payment term in the pile is denominated in something the operator controls: flight hours flown, flares expended, generator-hours run. In thirty-eight of the forty-one, the deliverable clause is some version of the same sentence — that seeding operations were conducted in accordance with the suspension criteria. Two go further and expressly disclaim any precipitation outcome, in plain language, on page four. Whether seeding works is not the argument on this desk. It works, a little. What nobody can do is weigh the rain that would have fallen anyway. So we stopped arguing about the physics and asked what the buyers are actually promised. > **Figure:** Forty-one contracts, six operators, one standards body — see https://theyburied.com/article/no-rainfall-clause ## What the money buys The contracts price three things and only three: an aircraft in the air, a flare burnt, a ground generator running. A typical winter agreement in this pile commits an operator to a stated number of seasonal flight hours at a stated hourly rate, plus consumables at cost plus a margin, plus a mobilisation fee. The operator invoices monthly against a log. Nowhere does a dollar move because water arrived. Dr. Talia Brenninkmeyer-Osei, who reviewed our reading, disputes one word of it — she would not call the arrangement *unmeasured*, since the flight hours are measured to the minute. She is right, and it is the point. Everything in the contract is measured. The thing the public thinks it is buying is the one quantity that is not in it. ## Paid to stand down The suspension criteria are the reason the word *attempt* keeps appearing. Every contract in the pile suspends operations under stated conditions: downstream flood risk, existing snowpack above a threshold, avalanche advisories, air traffic restrictions, temperatures outside the window in which silver iodide does anything at all. Across the nineteen contracts whose logs we hold, operators stood down 38 per cent of otherwise eligible hours over three seasons. Downstream flood risk accounts for most of it. They were paid for standing by, at a reduced standby rate, in every one of the nineteen. That looks like the worst fact in this story and it is close to the opposite. An operator paid by the flying hour, with no standby provision, has a reason to fly into the four days he ought not to. The man who chairs the body that writes those criteria explains at the foot of this page, at length, what happened in 1972 when one did. ## The manager who reads clause 4 aloud Delphine Aguirre-Stott runs a western water district that holds two of the forty-one. She had the contract open on the boardroom table before our correspondent had finished the question. "Page four," she said. "It says we are not buying precipitation. I read that to my board every year in public and I put it in the packet." Her board buys the season, she says, the way it buys insurance — an option against a dry year, bought at a price the district can carry in a wet one. She has been asked repeatedly for an audit showing what the money produced. "I can't give them one," she said. "Nobody can. If somebody solves that, I will be the first customer." > It says we are not buying precipitation. I read that to my board every year in public and I put it in the packet. > > — Delphine Aguirre-Stott ## Nothing was hidden All forty-one contracts arrived inside the statutory period. One came back by return of post, with the clerk's own pencil note giving the page number of the clause we had asked about. Three operators sent their flight logs without being asked. The effect sizes from thirty-one randomised trials that this desk assembled last year are in the Vault at [[PX-1986]], and they are why the argument about whether seeding works cannot be settled from a contract. ## The one thing worth assembling There is a concentration here, and it took a diagram rather than a document. Six firms hold all forty-one contracts. The suspension standard that thirty-eight of those contracts incorporate by reference is written by a trade council, and that council is chaired by Ewart Cassin, whose nine-person works in Nebraska makes most of the flares those same contracts are billed in. None of that is secret. The membership list is published, the minutes are online, and the chairmanship is unpaid. It is simply the case that the man who writes the rule about when to burn a flare also sells the flare. His answer runs below and is the best thing on this page. What this desk takes from it is narrower than what will be quoted from it: an industry that sells attempts, prices them by the hour, says so in writing to buyers who read it — and a standards body of four hundred people who all sell something, which is not a cover-up but is not nothing either. ## Sources (invented) - Forty-one live cloud-seeding contracts, Water districts, two state agencies, four ski corporations, one irrigation cooperative — Requested under state public-records law and, from the ski corporations, by asking; all forty-one published in full with this story (March–July 2026) - Suspension logs, nineteen contracts, Operator stand-down records for the 2023–24, 2024–25 and 2025–26 seasons — Nine obtained with the contracts; seven released on a second request; three volunteered by operators who were not asked (April–July 2026) - Delphine Aguirre-Stott, General manager of a western water district holding two of the forty-one — Interviewed on the record twice, once in her boardroom with the contract open on the table (June 2026) - Ewart Cassin, Chairman of the standards council; owner of the flare works — Written questions, then interviewed by telephone for fifty minutes; reply printed unedited (July 2026) - Dr. Talia Brenninkmeyer-Osei, Hydrologist; works on seasonal water accounting for irrigation districts — Interviewed by video call (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1986: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1986 ## What we could not confirm - Whether any of the forty-one contracts produced any rain or snow. Nothing in this story touches that, and the reason is the one this desk set out in an earlier piece: there is no way to weigh the precipitation that would have fallen anyway. - Whether the 38 per cent stand-down rate is typical. It comes from nineteen sets of logs covering three seasons. The other twenty-two contracts' logs we do not hold, and two operators declined to release them. - Whether the flare works charges its council colleagues favourably. Cassin declined to give unit prices and no buyer we spoke to had ever compared them against another supplier, because for most of the season there is not another supplier. ## Right of reply **Ewart Cassin, chairman of the standards council and owner of Cassin Pyrotechnic Works** (Replied by letter on 20 July 2026, and then by telephone. The letter is printed in full and unedited.): > You have written to me about a conflict of interest and I am going to answer you about a flood. > > In March 1972 an operator in a valley I will not name ran a seeding programme through four days that anybody standing outside could see were wrong, because his contract paid him by the hour and there was nothing in it to make him stop. Two people drowned. The suspension criteria that you say my council writes were written because of that, mostly by a hydrologist who is now dead, and they are the reason the logs you have obtained show operators standing down more than a third of the hours they could have billed for. You have printed that number as though it were suspicious. It is the standard working. > > On the chairmanship. I have chaired the council for eleven years because in eleven years nobody else has stood. It is an unpaid position, the annual meeting takes two days of my life, and the minutes are on the website. I would hand it over this afternoon. If your newspaper knows a person in this industry who has no commercial interest in it, send them to me and I will nominate them myself, but I do not believe such a person exists, because there are about four hundred of us in the whole country and we all sell something. > > On my works. It employs nine people in a shed in Nebraska. I did not give you unit prices and I will tell you why, since you asked twice: the buyers here are public bodies who tender, and a published price is a price my two competitors read on Monday. If you think that is self-serving, you are entitled to, but it is also ordinary and every one of my customers knows what they pay. > > Now the part I would like you to print in full, because it is the only part I care about. You have discovered that we do not sell rain. We have never sold rain. It says so on page four of every contract in your pile, in language a lawyer for a water district wrote and a board voted on in public. We sell an attempt, made properly, in the hours when it is worth making, and stopped when it is not. Your own earlier piece explained better than I could why nobody can audit the other thing. It is a strange kind of exposure to spend eleven weeks proving that an industry's paperwork says exactly what the industry has said out loud for fifty years. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.