2010: The Heineman-Fleck Yard List
I’m having a hard time deciding whether this was the year of the yellow-bellied sapsucker, or of the swimming doves. I’m leaning toward the doves. The sapsucker was a novice birder’s treat. It showed up Dec. 11, a Saturday. I was sitting in my office at the back of the house and saw it flitting [...]
Top Inkstain Posts of 2010
Returning to a fine New Year’s tradition*, I bring you the most-read Inkstain posts of 2010. The thing is, it’s frankly a crap list, or at least a particularly odd one. It’s not based on some profundity on my part, but rather some weird Googlejuice, drawing random readers who no doubt click, scratch head, then [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The New START Bargain
From the newspaper this week, a look at the bargain that was struck to win support for the New START nuke deal with the Russians (sub/ad req), which includes money for a new plutonium lab at Los Alamos to replace its aging CMR building – despite dramatic cost increases and schedule delays since the project [...]
Moving Water, Virgin River Edition
I’ve been watching Lake Mead rise remarkably as a result of last week’s storm that blew through Nevada before drenching the Virgin River watershed on the Arizona-Nevada-Utah border area. It looks like Mead will finish December at a surface elevation of about 1086.25 feet above sea level, 2 feet above the level forecast a month [...]
Growth and Water
I’m certain this graph is of enormous importance in understanding long range water issues in the west. But I’m not entirely sure how. It’s single family home starts in the Phoenix (blue) and Las Vegas (red) metro areas over the last decade: What you see here is the housing bubble bursting. Adam Nagourney did a [...]
The Census and the Water
Rebecca Hammer at the NRDC makes an interesting point regarding the relationship between last week’s census data dump and water supplies: [T]he greatest U.S. population growth is occurring precisely where water supplies are going to be the most vulnerable over the coming years. She’s talking about us in the arid western United States.
River Beat: Conservation before shortage?
Shaun McKinnon reports this morning on a very interesting proposal under discussion in Arizona: Under a plan now being considered, water officials would pass up billions of gallons that they could take from the river in 2011, hoping to keep the drought-stricken reservoir full enough to avoid triggering automatic cutbacks. Any cutbacks could deny Arizona [...]
You don’t have to be dry to be water short
Georgia averages 50 inches (127 cm) of rain a year. Arizona averages 13 (30 cm). Which is more likely to suffer water shortages? I’m fascinated by the non-trivial nature of the answer. The problems of both lakes Lanier and Mead have been well chronicled. At Lanier in 2007, we were within three months of Atlanta [...]
What’s That Dam Called Again?
An Ngram for western water nerds- “Hoover Dam” v “Boulder Dam”:
US-Mexico Colorado River Deal
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Mexican Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada signed an agreement today that, for the first time, allows long-term storage of Mexican Colorado River water in U.S. reservoirs. It’s an attempt to solve a short-term problem – the inability of Mexican users to take their full allotments [...]
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