Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Some thoughts on the bathtub ring and Lake Mead’s historic drop below 1,075

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I’ve had my head down the last ten days reading and writing about 1940s and ’50s-era Los Angeles water management, and I look up to see that Lake Mead last week dropped below elevation 1,075, a level freighted with meaning. But what meaning, exactly? Drew Beckwith at Western Resource Advocates, in Caitlin McGlade’s story, wins for …

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Drought adaptive capacity, Kings County CA edition

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In your latest reminder that California agriculture has shown some remarkable capacity to adapt to that state’s crushing drought, Todd Fitchette in Western Farm Press reports that total agricultural farm gate receipts in Kings County, in California’s drought-devastated southern Central Valley, were up 9 percent last year: Kings County agricultural values advanced 9 percent from …

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Your 1952 Aquifer Queen of Central Water Basin

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Los Angeles water, management, circa 1952: There are many reasons for the diminishing underground water supply. Foremost among them, probably, is the vastly increased demand created by an unprecedented population influx and the constant press of industrial expansion. But there are important contributory reasons. Prolonged dry spells of little or no rain leave water-bearing aquifers …

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Arizona’s Colorado River zeitgeist

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In this morning’s Arizona Star, Tucson journalist Tony Davis asks, “Is California trying to take our water?” In journalism, there’s a joke known as “Betteridge’s Law“: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” As Tony’s story strongly suggests, the notion making the rounds these days in some Arizona political …

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Running out water – again with the governance

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This Alex Breitler story reminds how running out of water is almost invariably as much a problem of governance as much as it is of drought: MOUNTAIN HOUSE — Years before the first shovelful of earth was turned on this master-plan community near Tracy, developers and county officials knew that its sole source of water could …

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I am a Californian. I am a Westerner. I proudly wear flip-flops.

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In his dissent from the majority on today’s gay marriage ruling, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia weighed in on a central question confronting those of us in the western United States: Is California in The West? The court, Scalia notes, contains “not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner. …

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Albuquerque’s monsoon officially underway

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By the powers invested in my by no one in particular, I hereby declare Albuquerque’s 2015 Monsoon Season underway. The weather radar is showing blobs of color in the high country to the southwest, there are high clouds popping up above the mountains to the east of the city, but the real clue was how …

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