Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: first-ever San Juan Chama Project shortfall

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The standard Bureau of Reclamation map of the Colorado River Basin has a series of red-dashed slivers beyond the physical boundaries of the basin itself, the places where we’ve chosen to artificially extend the watershed’s boundaries. In the process, we have created entire communities dependent on the success or failure of the basin’s water management …

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On New Mexico’s Rio Grande, a brutal four years

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With a sub-par snowpack once again in New Mexico’s high country, I got a Twitter question this morning about the last time we’d had a good snowpack. My favorite came in 2008, when I was just starting to track this sort of thing closely: SAN MARCIAL— Water was already lapping at the side of the …

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Lake Mead in 2014 headed for second biggest drop in modern era

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With just a few days left, it looks like Lake Mead will end 2014 down 19 feet, which would be the second biggest one-year drop of the “modern era” (the years since completion of Glen Canyon Dam upstream damped down the river’s ups and downs). With inflow largely regulated by Glen Canyon Dam and outflow largely …

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the dwindling of California’s “wretched little mud-holes”

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John Van Dyke, in his epic visit to the deserts of western North America a century ago, wrote harshly of their springs: Occasionally one meets with a little stream where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from below forces up some of the water; but these springs are of very rare occurrence. And …

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Lake Mead: 40 percent full, or 60 percent empty?

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Annie Snider left an excellent summary in our Christmas stocking of the state of play on the Colorado River. Lake Mead approaches the end of the Calendar year at elevation 1,087 feet above sea level, which is nearly 20 feet below last year at this time, as basin water managers scramble to build new institutional widgets …

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Using less water, Queensland edition

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“The average daily water consumption across the south east in November 2014 was 190 litres per person per day. This is a stark contrast to consumption levels before the millennium drought, when the region’s residents were using an average of 330 litres per person per day.” That’s Queensland, Australia. To translate to U.S. measures, that’s …

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