Chris Brooks has a post on proposed legislation in Arizona that would have created incentives for large-scale rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge. The idea was to give people water rights to the resulting water stored in the aquifer. As Chris notes, there are a couple of problems. First, some of the rainwater you harvest and …
If you’re in Albuquerque, I invite you to come hear my latest thinking on the stuff I write about here – “Chasing Water: Climate Change, Drought and the Implications of the Disappearing Lake Mead.” April meeting of my friends at New Mexicans for Science and Reason, Wed., April 13, Rm 2402, UNM Law School.
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …
Many years ago, as a young pup of a reporter, I was sent to Madrid, NM, on a quiet Saturday to chronicle an old-timers day in the old mining town-turned art colony. Madrid’s community center sits next to the Oscar Huber Ballpark which, legend has it, was the first lighted baseball field west of the …
Once, an impossibly long long time ago, it rained at my house.
Also from this morning’s paper, a story documenting Albuquerque’s 60th consecutive day without measurable precipitation. We’ve got an outside chance of breaking the streak this evening, and then again mid-week. But the forecasts are basically bleak. But the real import was tucked in near the end of the story (sub/ad req): Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau …
Continue reading ‘Something Else I Wrote Elsewhere: Supplementing the River’ »
From the Sunday Journal, a look at two proposals to pump and pipe water from rural New Mexico to the state’s rapidly developing Rio Grande corridor (sub/ad req): Ray Pittman pulled his 1994 F-150 pickup to the top of a thinly wooded hill, a short walk from the water tank he built back in 1999 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Moving Water, New Mexico Style’ »
From today’s Deseret News, a sigh of relief for this year’s beneficent snowpack, which has has eliminated (for now) the possibility of a shortage declaration on the lower Colorado River: If Lake Mead drops a little further, it would force a declaration of a shortage and a potential cascade of orders to cut water use. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: About that “Law of the River” thing…’ »
Our friend Alison, who is a shopper of profound skill, scored this Shasta Dam tourist plate on a recent expedition. Built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation between 1938 and 1945, Shasta is part of the first post-Hoover Dam generation, a concrete arch structure capable of storing more than 4.5 million acre feet of water. …
From Thursday’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a look at what is increasingly looking to be a very dry year on the Rio Grande, which has become entangled in a Byzantine governance issue involving allocation and distribution of Lower Rio Grande water: In recent years, dry conditions have made managing the river more difficult. Eight out of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Year on the Rio Grande’ »