Lake Powell, the large Upper Colorado River Basin Reservoir sitting behind Glen Canyon Dam, ended May with a surface elevation of 3,599.44 feet above sea level, 3 feet higher than projected a month ago, thanks to greater-than-anticipated runoff during the month. Some of that’s just time-shifting – an early melt bringing water down sooner than …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: June numbers show slight improvement in Lake Powell’ »
In an op-ed in today’s Sacramento Bee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, has a lot of ideas for fixing California’s water problems: bigger dams tweaks (unspecified) to the Endangered Species Act a Peripheral Tunnel (do we still call it “Peripheral”?) to ease conveyance of water from north to south of the water Californians will be storing …
Continue reading ‘Dianne Feinstein has a bunch of #cawater ideas’ »
With 0.02 inch (0.5 mm) of rain yesterday afternoon, we’ve finally hit 1 inch (25 mm) at our house for the 2012-13 (Oct.-Sept.) water year. Then it rained again this afternoon, making this the first time we’ve had consecutive days with measurable precipitation since Dec. 15-16. Through the end of May, we’re at 21 percent …
update: Michael Cohen at the Pacific Institute emailed with a subtle clarification. If Lake Mead, as the USBR analysis reported below suggests, drops below elevation 1,075 feet above sea level during 2015, the actual shortage declaration on the lower Colorado would then apply to the following year’s water allocation. More specifically, during August the Bureau …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River shortage declaration possible by 2015/16’ »
The city government folks in Santa Fe, NM, want to assure you that, despite all the smoke, Santa Fe itself is currently not on fire: A news release issued by city government on Wednesday declared that “forest fires burning in Northern New Mexico are well removed from the City of Santa Fe and are not …
Continue reading ‘Dear tourists: many areas of New Mexico are currently not on fire’ »
So I’ll be the representing the journalist rabble in a discussion of the fate of the Colorado River tomorrow (Thurs. 6/12/2013) at 9 a.m. PDT on KNPR, public radio in Las Vegas, NV.
I live in a suburban neighborhood that dates to the early 1950s, when this swath of mesa east of the Rio Grande was cleared for homes. It’s almost certainly at that point that the city of Albuquerque, which then managed the water utility, laid a grid of pipes to bring water to the area. Carl …
I write about minnows in the Rio Grande, and smelt and salmon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Richard White writes about salmon in the Columbia. In all three cases, we’re discussing species-focused environmental efforts – to “save” the silvery minnow in the Rio Grande, or salmon and the delta smelt in California, or salmon in …
In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for a skunk. Richard White, The Organic Machine
So I’m all, like “view from nowhere” in this piece in this morning’s newspaper. I’m genuinely agnostic on the question of the fate of the silvery minnow, an endangered fish found only on the stretch of the Rio Grande that flows through Albuquerque and points slightly north and south. But I think we need to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: “Emerson, Nixon and the silvery minnow”’ »