The Last Christmas of Sears
If I was still a newspaper reporter, I would have been begging for this story.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
DCP by the numbers
I’m forever needing to look up these numbers, sticking them here so I can find them easily, and y’all can as well. It’s the cuts by Lake Mead elevation levels for the various parties under the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan and the related Minute 323 between the U.S. and Mexico:
Megadrought
In the southwest…. “The last 19 years have been equivalent to the worst 19 years of the worst mega-droughts on record,” said Park Williams, a professor of bioclimatology at Columbia University, at a presentation of the work. Only three recent mega-droughts—in the late 800s, the mid-1100s, and the late 1500s—were worse than the current period, …
Wait I think I solved the Colorado River problem
Conjure Water is a mage spell that provides the caster with mana-replenishing drinks. There is no limit to the amount of water a mage may conjure or carry. Fetch us some mages. (source)
Beyond the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan
LAS VEGAS – With Commissioner of Reclamation Brenda Burman’s ultimatum to the Colorado River Basin States at the just-completed Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas, it seems we’re going to get a Drought Contingency Plan, or something very much like it, in 2019. This could be very messy, but it suggests that …
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Elwood Mead on the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan
Mead, Elwood. (1903). Irrigation Institutions.
The tiny fragility of Hoover Dam
Looking for art for the new book, I ran across the above picture from the amazing Library of Congress collection of Carol Highsmith’s work. Hoover Dam as cultural icon is big and muscular, which is by design and also a function of the fact that it’s hard to get back and see the dam in …
Colorado River water use keeps dropping
New data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shows that total 2017 water use in the basin – 14.07 million acre feet – was the lowest since 1984. The total here includes estimated consumptive use in the Upper Basin, Lower Basin, Mexico, plus reservoir evaporation and estimated evapotranspiration by native vegetation.
Another Arizona Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan sticking point?
A letter this afternoon from Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke to Central Arizona Project board members, also circulated to Arizona’s Drought Contingency Plan Steering Committee, suggests another hangup in Arizona’s efforts to agree on a plan to reduce its Colorado River water use. It involves the distinction between using water from on-river …
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1078.32
The surface level of Lake Mead, which holds water supplies for Nevada, Arizona, California, Sonora, and Baja, ended November 2018 at 1,078.32 feet above sea level. That is 2-1/2 feet below last year at this time.