Jeffrey Mount and Jay Lund (UC Davis water guys) draw lessons for California from Morganza and the lower Mississippi: In the Central Valley, those in the floodplain operate under an old adage: You hope that the other guy’s levee fails first. For political, economic and legal reasons, our institutions have been unable to move beyond …
How dry is it this year in New Mexico? So dry that rafters on the Rio Chama will have to use spare drinking water, pumped through the system weekends this spring and summer, for their fun. From Friday’s ABQJournal (sub/ad req, I think): Albuquerque has to move its water supplies down the Rio Chama sometime, …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Rafting on Drinking Water’ »
There’s a myth that has firmly taken hold of a busted La Niña forecast on the Colorado River this year. It shows up this morning in a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial. No. This issue came up last September, as we were heading into the La Niña season. It was a common misapprehension back then, and …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The Myth of a Busted La Niña Forecast’ »
I’m a big fan of beat reporting – steady, day-in, day-out attention to a topic. I love to do it, and when I’m trying to learn a new topic, the first place I turn is to the beat reporters who cover it. Today’s example is the Stockton Record’s Alex Breitler, who cut through the noise …
The latest USBR monthly Colorado River is out, and just wow. From Shaun McKinnon: In its latest 24-month report, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation added almost 1 million acre-feet to the estimated amount of water that will be released from Lake Powell downstream into Mead, the wetter forecast possible because of near-record snowpack on the …
Continue reading ‘River beat: what a difference a month makes’ »
Matt Weiser reports the Brown administration* is backing away from a giant “Peripheral Tunnel” option for solving California’s bay-delta mess, or at least backing away from the notion that the big tunnel is The Plan: Gov. Jerry Brown’s top water official revealed Tuesday that a giant tunnel diverting water from the Sacramento River is no …
Given the current flooding on the Mississippi, this from the Public Policy Institute of California’s discussion of flood risk in that state seems relevant: Perception of risk directly changes pressure for improving flood management. Longer periods of time since a natural disaster reduce the perception of risk—a phenomenon referred to as the “flood memory half-life.” …
We won’t have solid numbers updating the Colorado River runoff situation until later this week, but Henry Brean has an early read on the situation, reporting that Lake Mead is now expected to rise 30 feet between now and the end of the water year.
In trying to understand California’s efforts to deal with its Bay-Delta water problems, I’ve been digging into the Delta Stewardship Council and Bay Delta Conservation Plan processes, and frankly have been left feeling a bit like Dorothy upon her descent into Oz – lots of familiar cues, but over and over again things weren’t quite …
What I did on my spring vacation: Lissa and I got the backyard train running (track needed a bit of post-winter sprucing up) We rode the big people train to Santa Fe I got new glasses We got far more work done to the car than I expected Slept in some, but got up early …