Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, is in the hunt for more water: A recycled water project started in 1993 moved forward Monday night as the Pasadena City Council approved the environmental review of a plan to funnel water from Glendale. The $50 million project could take 20 years to complete, with a pipeline running …
Continue reading ‘Does Pasadena, Calif., need more water?’ »
Sarah Tory at High Country News has a nice summary of one of those classic western water issues worth watching – the Lake Powell Pipeline proposal: The project would pump 86,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Powell 140 miles across the desert through a 69-inch buried pipe and then 2,000 feet up and over the …
Continue reading ‘Will Utah take more water from the Colorado River Basin?’ »
Via the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, here’s the February precipitation to date in the parts of the basin that make snow and therefore water: Beyond the dry, this map does a good job of how tenuously tiny an area produces the river’s water supply.
I was talking the other day about California’s struggle to solve its Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta problems with a friend who grows food with Colorado River water in California’s southeastern desert. The delta’s more than five hundred miles and three or four watersheds away as the crow flies from his farm. Why such a keen interest? …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta-Colorado River farming nexus’ »
I’ve recently become acquainted with interesting research by Texas A&M geographer Wendy Jepson, who has studied household water insecurity along the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s a tendency to look for a technological fix (“Look at this cool new filter we invented!”), but Jepson found this less than effective (“HWS” is “household water security”): We evaluated the efficacy …
Continue reading ‘Water insecurity: think poverty, not climate’ »
In my endless puzzling over the meanings we attach to the word “drought”, there is this, from yesterday’s Climate Prediction Center seasonal drought outlook: What does it mean to talk about “drought” in places like Yuma or the Imperial Valley that average less than 4 inches (10 cm) of rain a year, and that get …
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Members of the Colorado River Research Group, scholars who study the basin, have a useful new report out today (pdf here) urging a more unified approach to the currently fragmented environmental management initiatives on the Colorado River. It describes “an incomplete patchwork of largely uncoordinated efforts, existing in some cases to facilitate compliance with environmental …
Continue reading ‘On the Colorado River, the environment is the junior user’ »
It was 72F (22C) in Albuquerque yesterday, a record, and our decent snowpack is already starting to melt out. It’s early for that. And February (see PRISM map at right) has been dry, which hasn’t helped. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, snowpack measured across all the river’s main tributary systems above Lake Powell (the …
Continue reading ‘Awaiting our May miracle in the Colorado River Basin’ »
We’ve got a ton of hero/villain narratives underway around the water contamination problems of Flint, Michigan. But there’s always a risk of post hoc storytelling here. As storytelling beings, we gravitate to narratives like that. But inevitably the heroes and villains are embedded in deeper institutional structures that are a necessary precursor to the problem, …
Lynda Mapes and her colleagues at the Seattle Times built a beautiful multimedia piece on the return of nature to the Elwha River on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula now that the dams are gone. It has an amazing picture from 2010, pre-dam removal, of Chinook salmon at the bottom of the dam with this caption: In …