With Lake Mead water levels dropping, Pat Mulroy is in a race against Mother Nature. That’s how the risks facing by Las Vegas, Nev., were framed this week in a piece in The Henderson Press. But as one of the members of my water geek brain trust, Phil King, likes to point out, reservoir levels …
Here’s a great quote from Carl Hayden. It was June, 1922, still in the early days of the jockeying for development of the Colorado River’s water. Hayden was at the time a relatively junior member of the House, having not yet ascended to the political heights from which decades later, as Arizona’s senior senator, he …
Continue reading ‘Carl Hayden: “water as cheaply as it can be served”’ »
It was dark when I got out of my rental car yesterday evening in Rancho Bernardo, north of San Diego. I couldn’t really see the place, but I could smell the tell-tale scent of eucalyptus. I slept with the window open. There was a eucalyptus outside my window. I slept well. When I grew up …
Chris Austin reminds us why California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan may look like a water management plan, but isn’t: The Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) is often criticized for not being comprehensive enough because it doesn’t consider other actions that could be taken such as desalination, or other statewide or regional needs such as water …
Grasshopper hangin’ out in our backyard piñon:
Working on a book chapter about the genesis and importance of the Arizona v. California litigation over the Colorado River, I ran across this priceless little bit of business from 1944. It is Harry Bashore, Comissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, testifying in Phoenix in July of that year, before the a subcommittee of …
Continue reading ‘Drought and Despair: “these enemies of mankind”’ »
As a group of U.S. politicians prepared to vote on a measure intended to delay implementation of a federal effort to extend health care to uninsured Americans, one of them, a Republican Texas congressman named John Culberson, was quoted thus: “I said, like 9/11, ‘let’s roll!’” It is a reference to the words attributed to …
I’m not watching C-Span today: Consider this, published by a team of U.S. health care researchers in 2004: “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.” That was five years ago. The quiet tragedy associated with a lack of health insurance has continued, the numbers growing in the …
Continue reading ‘On health care policy, a personal story’ »
It rained kind of a lot in the intermountain west this month, which raises a fascinating question about the tools we use for Colorado River management, and the tendency of water managers and management institutions to base significant actions on median flow forecasts rather than managing with a flexibility that considers the probabilistic nature of …
Continue reading ‘Reduced releases from Lake Powell: no going back’ »
I loved this boldly written line in Bettina Boxall’s Los Angeles Times story last Sunday on the question of who will pay, and how much, for a proposed multi-billion dollar pair of water supply tunnels beneath the Sacramento Delta: Much of California agriculture is accustomed to vast amounts of cheap, federally subsidized water in the …
Continue reading ‘Federally subsidized California farm water’ »