The folks at Arizona’s Salt River Project are soliciting ideas from the public for the time capsule they plan to bury as part of Roosevelt Dam’s centennial celebration this spring. “What would you lock away for 50 years and give to the future people of Phoenix?” My question is how many acre feet you could …
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the implications of Santa Fe and Albuquerque shifting from groundwater to surface water imported from the Colorado River Basin (sub/ad req): For 40 years, San Juan-Chama water has been added to the Rio Grande. You could think of it as “bonus water,” and its loss should in theory …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Changing Ways New Mexico Manages its Water’ »
This is one of those headline cheats that my journalism friends heap merciless scorn upon, the question lead for which the answer is “no”. Sometimes thinking through the implications of the doctrine of prior appropriation pretzels my brain. The idea, in short, is that the people who were there first get to use the water, …
Over at Columbia University’s “Water Matters”, Debbie Cook has been making the case against desalination as a water supply solution. She has a number of lines of argument, but it all boils down (pardon the pun) to cost, and to a series of societal tradeoffs that flow from that. Consider Saudi Arabia’s decision to use …
Lee’s Ferry is a storyteller’s delight, one of those connect-the-dots places that is simply irresistible. On the Colorado River just downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, it is where John D. Lee was sent into hiding (exile?) following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where John Wesley Powell split his second Grand Canyon trip in two, where the …
Continue reading ‘“He called the place Lonely Dell, and it was not a misnomer”’ »
This dude used to work with me at the newspaper. He was in a back corner, both literally and metaphorically, and was kinda quiet, and it took me a while to figure out that he was the smartest and most interesting person in the room.
I don’t know Florida water issues at all, so maybe someone can help me here. Tampa Bay Water spent $160 million to build a desal plant. But they don’t use it all that much: Tampa Bay Water says it costs four times as much to turn water from Tampa Bay into drinking water as it …
A couple of (possibly connected?) things that crossed my desk this morning – According to the latest data from the San Francisco Fed, Las Vegas (Nev.) has huge foreclosure numbers. And then this good news, from Henry Brean at the Las Vegas Review Journal: [W]ater use continues to decline in the valley, where the water authority …
Tom Yulsman and Brendon Bosworth have an excellent piece over at Climate Central looking at drought and water supply on my favorite river*. They capture what I think is one of the key elements in understanding what’s happening on the Colorado: the realization that, independent of the drought that has plagued the river for more …
With the mondo snow pack and good runoff forecast, Arizona may no longer need to leave some of its annual share of Colorado River water in Lake Mead, Shaun McKinnon reports: The CAP had been discussing a plan to forfeit as much as 80,000 acre-feet of its allocation this year to help keep water levels …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: AZ May Not Need to Leave Water in Mead’ »