The Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant is scheduled to begin its operational test phase next week. In preparation, a U.S.-Mexican team is ramping up its monitoring efforts at the Cienega de Santa Clara, an accidental wetland in what was once the Colorado River delta. The Cienega is the inadvertent product of U.S. ag drainage …
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There’s a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation graph making the rounds that captures the core issue going forward on the Colorado River Basin. Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand, courtesy USBR I first noticed it in Jennifer Pitt’s congressional testimony in early April. At the “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium I just attended in Las Vegas, …
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The Cienega de Santa Clara, the one remaining major wetland in the Colorado River Delta, is not being drained as a result of Mexico’s 7.2 magnitude earthquake, according to Karl Flessa, the University of Arizona researcher who is part of a team monitoring the ecosystem. The area was hit hard by the earthquake. The San …
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Everywhere I went on my road trip over the last week up the Lower Colorado River, it seemed like the black-necked stilts were following me. I saw them Monday night in the East Yuma Wetlands, a great little habitat restoration project laced with trails on a bend in what’s left of the Colorado River, just upstream …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Ryan and the black-necked stilt’ »
LAS VEGAS, NEV – Walking up from our hotel to the strip in search of a place to eat last night, battered by neon and flashing lights, my dinner companion commented ruefully on how distant we were from nature. I suppose you could say that in the middle of any city, but in Las Vegas …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Las Vegas edition II’ »
YUMA, ARIZ – On the Lower Colorado River, there are three large municipal water wholesalers behaving with a certain air of desperation in their hunt for long term supplies of water: the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas), the Metropolitan Water District (Southern California) and the Central Arizona Project (Phoenix/Tucson). So who wants it bad? …
LAS VEGAS, NEV – The distance between Morelos Dam on the lower Colorado and the Bellagio Fountain is profound. Morelos spans the U.S.-Mexico border, with the wheat fields and onions of the Yuma County Water Users Association behind me as I took this picture and Algodones on the far bank. Most years, Morelos is where …
YUMA, ARIZ – There’s not much Colorado River left by the time it gets to Yuma, on the U.S.-Mexico border. But the folks here seem to embrace it, modest though it may be. Warm summer evening, and people are out floating, barbecuing, swimming and generally acting like they feel comfortable with their river: From Colorado …
HOLBROOK, ARIZ – I grew up entranced by radio. There was something about the magic of the disembodied voice, always deep-throated, speaking to me from a world I could only imagine. It was Vin Scully calling a baseball game, or the mystery of hockey play by play (imagine a kid lying in the dark with …
When I first started to seriously cover Colorado River water, I kept going around to smart water people asking the same question: when we finally hit the wall, and there is less water in the Upper Colorado River Basin than needed to meet the states’ needs – a “call”, in the legal lingo – how …
Continue reading ‘The Implications of Uncertainty in Administering Upper Basin Shortage’ »