A water nerd friend and I made a pilgrimage yesterday evening to Hoover Dam, spanning the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border. We’d had dinner at one of the restaurants on the docks at Hemenway Harbor, and driven up to the old abandoned boat ramp at Boulder Harbor, two Lake Mead landmarks for me, places …
Continue reading ‘Hoover Dam and the social nature of infrastructure’ »
By Jack Schmidt, Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies How did we do in the continuing effort to recover reservoir storage? How much reservoir storage accumulated from this year’s snowpack, and how does that accumulation compare to other years? In Summary: Total basin-wide reservoir storage is an appropriate metric to describe the status …
Continue reading ‘The 2024 Runoff Season Comes to an End – How Did We Do?’ »
Preparing for A Thing I’m doing next week, I updated the Crazy Fleck Spreadsheet this morning of data from Reclamation’s annual Lower Basin decree accounting reports. Amid all the angst and rhetoric, it is easy to miss the salient fact made clear by this graph: Lower Basin water users have reduced their take on the …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River 2023 Water Use: An Optimistic Narrative’ »
Our friends at the Abiquiu News (yay local journalism!) have an update on the sediment plug on the Rio Chama that’s been playing havoc with Rio Grande flows: The Rio Chama is officially on its way back into its original channel as of Tuesday evening. Workers from the US Department of the Interior Bureau of …
Congress set aside substantial sums of money in 2021 and ’22 in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to address needs for access to safe, clean drinking water. But, as John Echohawk puts it: While the appropriation of funding for infrastructure is a critical first step, it is only that – continuing …
Continue reading ‘Tribal access to water – filling a key gap’ »
Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?” My answer: We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow …
Continue reading ‘In New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, the wheels are coming off’ »
A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.” Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, …
Continue reading ‘A reminder to be careful how you think about “wasted” water’ »
In my book Water is for Fighting Over, I delighted in this cheap shot at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office – … a grandiose white building atop a hill … surrounded by an expanse of lawn that is embarrassing in a desert city that averages less than six inches of rain a year. …
Continue reading ‘Important update on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City lawn’ »
A friend visiting New York, knowing of my fascination with Mark Rothko, texted me a picture of one of his paintings (in MOMA or someplace?). This led to a conversation with my wife, Lissa, who reminded me that she and I, years before we knew one another, had both been to see the 1979 retrospective …
I don’t write about homelessness much here because I don’t know enough to feel like I have much useful to add to the words and work of those who do. But I do think about it a lot. I also think a lot about the challenges of collective choice and collective action. Which is at the …