Matt Weiser takes us into the strange world of California municipal water infrastructure finance, where costs are relatively fixed and vendors are trying to sell less of their product: [M]any water agencies are feeling the strain because they had already delayed imposing rate increases for a number of years due to the drought and a …
Continue reading ‘Conservation and the municipal water finance dilemma’ »
This image depicting a years’ worth of Colorado River water use, from an emailer I got from the Southern Nevada Water Authority:
Some thoughts after today’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on federal western California New Mexico etc. drought legislation…. On Congressional process We currently have two “California drought bills” – H.R. 2898 developed by California House Republicans and S. 1894. They are very different. As a matter of process, the details of the difference don’t …
Continue reading ‘Thoughts on federal drought legislation circa October 2015’ »
In response to reader feedback, here’s my depressing graph of current Lake Mead storage, adapted to be readable on your mobile phone. Yes, there are people now who prefer their bad news on the go! More background here.
It’s one of those milestones that’s an entirely arbitrary result of the units we use to measure, but it’s probably nevertheless worth marking: for the first time since it was filled in the 1930s, Lake Mead ended the “water year” below 10 million acre feet of storage. The finally elevation at midnight last Wednesday, Sept. …
Today’s federal drought monitor for New Mexico passed an important milestone. For the first time since November 2010, more than half the state is completely free of any drought or “abnormally dry” designation:
From his Sept. 30, 1935 speech dedicating what was then called “Boulder Dam,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes: I venture to hope that this dam, with its great storage of health and wealth and happiness for thousands of people, will stand as a definite opening of a new era with respect to the natural …
Brandon Loomis, in an excellent recent piece on the problems of the Salton Sea, quoted a resident along the troubled inland California lake who thinks the answer to its decline is straightforward: Rod Jeffries, a 64-year-old urban refugee from San Francisco, is confident the state will act…. His favored solution is to pipe seawater from …
Continue reading ‘Why pumping water from the ocean to save the Salton Sea is a bad idea’ »
At the end of a marvelous twitter soliloquy on Hegel, Locke, Dewey, and the implications of last night’s meeting on sex education in Vegas schools, Las Vegas Sun politics editor Scott Lucas concluded with this: Anyways, I'm just a journalist, the fuck do I know? — Scott Lucas (@ScottLucasNV) September 30, 2015 Havin’ that …
Water year 2014-15 is ending with low flows again on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico. (We’ve only had one year since 2000 with above-average flows.) Lissa and I walked out to the Rio Grande in Bernalillo County’s far South Valley this afternoon. The water was low. Low is normal for this time of …
Continue reading ‘A quiet end to the water year on the Rio Grande’ »