Archive of posts filed under the Arizona category.

Fallowed ground: 21st century water institutions on Yuma Mesa

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This is a field fallowed under a 2013 agreement between Yuma Mesa Irrigation and Drainage District and the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District. The deal is small, but it raises all kinds of fascinating issues of both water management and culture down here in Arizona’s southwestern corner, where water is both economically critical and culturally …

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It’s not all Hoover Dam and giant canals

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The Colorado River isn’t very big here, but there’s still enough water in it to drop a pump and irrigate a crop. This is on a weird little geographic island, a chunk of land that is on the west (California) side of the river, but legally in Arizona – left stranded when the Colorado River …

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Habitat conservation on the Lower Colorado

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“Collaboration is a much better way of working than litigation.” – Estevan López, Commissioner, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, during today’s festivities marking the tenth anniversary of the Multi-Species Conservation Program on the Lower Colorado River. Jerry Zimmerman, former executive director of the Colorado River Board of California, told a story this morning about how the …

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Colorado River Basin forecast: where’d that 1.3 million acre feet go?

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The April-July runoff forecast into Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, is just 52 percent of the long term mean, according to new numbers out today from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. That is roughly 1.3 million acre feet less water flowing into Lake Powell than the forecast of just a month ago, the …

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The Colorado River’s Parker valley – “the illusion of plenty”

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Parker Live, a news web site based in Parker, Arizona, seems to be engaging in a little bit of what Kathryn Sorensen calls “drought schadenfreude” here. Parker sits on the Colorado, at the head of a rich farming valley with some of the most senior rights on the river and big farming that has thus far …

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Dams, water, and the Arizona state seal

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Arizona’s state seal is a fascinating bit of iconography in light of the state’s uneasy relationship with aridity and developed water. A dam, a river and irrigated land are given center stage – water projects as state destiny. Today I learned the seal’s details are actually enshrined in the state constitution: In the background shall be …

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