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 …
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John McChesney, former NPR guy now at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, has jumped into the Law of the River discussion with a look at Doug Kenney’s work on rethinking the Law of the River: Kenney doesn’t believe the law of the river needs to be tossed out, but he says it …
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The US Bureau of Reclamation announced today that they’ve completed the pilot run of their Yuma Desalting Plant, cleaning up 30,000 acre feet of really crappy ag drain water. (“Crappy ag drain water” – my words, not theirs). From Joyce Lobeck in the Yuma Sun (and seldom was their a more appropriately named newspaper): Undertaken …
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When the science team working on the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) invited me to give a media-communication perspective at a meeting back in the summer of 2006, I titled my talk “Maybe We Shouldn’t Call It `Drought’”. The problem is that the word is used in so many different ways, meaning so many different …
I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt about the water issues that so obsess us here in the Southwestern United States. Most of us have running water in our homes. It’s remarkably free of contaminants and pathogens. The arguments we have are generally about how to distribute this bounty, not whether we have it at …
Spending a weekend (mostly) unplugged (I’m writing this on my iPod), Lissa and I ended up this afternoon at the Georgia O’Keeffe in Santa Fe. In one alcove, photos of O’Keeffe on the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, circa 1964 – the year they closed the dam and began flooding it. Apparently her friend Eliot …
From the morning paper (sub/ad req): Groundwater contamination from a Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill has spread farther than previously believed, according to a report presented to municipal water officials Wednesday. A new test well drilled by the Air Force last year beneath a southeast Albuquerque neighborhood shows evidence of contamination, two blocks …
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