From H2oradio: When he’s doing his search pattern if he detects the odor that he’s trained to find, which is invasive mussels, he’ll sit down. Then as a handler, I’ll ask him to pinpoint exactly where he found it so he’ll point to it with his nose and then I’ll verify and I’ll look and …
Continue reading ‘Adorable dogs protect our waterways from evil quagga mussels’ »
OtPR has a super insightful observation about three decades of California water policy: The Peripheral Canal was voted down in 1982. My sense is that the possibility of the Peripheral Canal has largely paralyzed California water policy since then (with the possible exception of IRWM). If the Peripheral Canal had been entirely off the table, the regions …
Continue reading ‘Has the Peripheral Delta Tunnel Canal Thingie paralyzed California water?’ »
The great decoupling between Albuquerque’s growth and its water use, with total use down another 3 percent in 2015, continuing a trend that over two decades has led to a 24 percent drop in water use, even as population has grown 25 percent. I don’t have population numbers yet that I need to do the …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque’s water use dropped another 3 percent in 2015’ »
There’s a fun Twitter meme called “Throwback Thursday”, abbreviated #tbt. It looks something like this:
In the waning days of my career as a newspaper reporter, my colleagues and I talked a lot about pirate ships. The notion came from a piece David Carr wrote shortly before the death of Ben Bradlee, in which Carr described Bradlee as a pirate, and the Washington Post as his ship. I think it was Jeff Proctor …
California Gov. Jerry Brown has requested $80 in his new budget for dust mitigation and habitat restoration at the Salton Sea, Jesse Marx and Sammy Roth report: That’s less than the $150 million local officials wanted, but still far more than the state has ever allocated for restoration projects at the dying lake. The money …
Continue reading ‘More California state money for the Salton Sea’ »
All the cool kids seem to be buying up real estate in the Palo Verde Irrigation District. First it was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has upped its stake in the Colorado River farming valley to 22,000 acres. Now comes news that Almarai, a dairy company, bought 1,790 acres to grow food …
Continue reading ‘Note to self: invest my next $31.8 million in Palo Verde real estate’ »
The social media team at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California tweeted a couple of nice pictures this evening:
Every toilet currently in stock at my local Home Depot has the EPA WaterSense label, even the cheapest ones, meaning they uses 1.28 gallons per flush or less. This is a big part of why we see water use – on a per capita basis, but also in some cases on an absolute basis – …
Continue reading ‘Low-flush at the Home Depot: bending the water use curve down’ »
In response to my cattle v. people post earlier today, Tom Swetnam asked if I had data for sheep: @jfleck I have been looking for a graph like that! Do you have sheep numbers? Multiple times cows in early decades, I think. — Tom Swetnam (@Tom_Swetnam) January 10, 2016 USDA’s data only go back …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s population history, now with added sheeply goodness’ »