Out toward the top left corner of this picture – maybe a little bit left, out of the frame – is the point where the Southern Nevada Water Authority gets its water out of Lake Mead. There’s nothing to see – the intake is at the bottom of the reservoir. Completed in 2015, …
Continue reading ‘Tipping Point: Colorado River Reckoning’ »
A water nerd friend and I made a pilgrimage yesterday evening to Hoover Dam, spanning the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border. We’d had dinner at one of the restaurants on the docks at Hemenway Harbor, and driven up to the old abandoned boat ramp at Boulder Harbor, two Lake Mead landmarks for me, places …
Continue reading ‘Hoover Dam and the social nature of infrastructure’ »
By Jack Schmidt, Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies How did we do in the continuing effort to recover reservoir storage? How much reservoir storage accumulated from this year’s snowpack, and how does that accumulation compare to other years? In Summary: Total basin-wide reservoir storage is an appropriate metric to describe the status …
Continue reading ‘The 2024 Runoff Season Comes to an End – How Did We Do?’ »
Preparing for A Thing I’m doing next week, I updated the Crazy Fleck Spreadsheet this morning of data from Reclamation’s annual Lower Basin decree accounting reports. Amid all the angst and rhetoric, it is easy to miss the salient fact made clear by this graph: Lower Basin water users have reduced their take on the …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River 2023 Water Use: An Optimistic Narrative’ »
A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.” Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, …
Continue reading ‘A reminder to be careful how you think about “wasted” water’ »
In my book Water is for Fighting Over, I delighted in this cheap shot at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office – … a grandiose white building atop a hill … surrounded by an expanse of lawn that is embarrassing in a desert city that averages less than six inches of rain a year. …
Continue reading ‘Important update on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City lawn’ »
Janet Wilson had a super helpful piece this week in the Desert Sun about steps being taken (in a hurry) to get the institutional widgets in place to meet Lower Basin commitments to reduce water use under a deal hashed out in spring 2023 to head of Colorado River NEPA litigation. If all goes as …
Continue reading ‘Hustling to get Imperial Irrigation District water reduction tools in place’ »
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Friday in a lawsuit between Texas and New Mexico over Rio Grande water reframes discussions in Colorado River Basin, where the threat of a similar Supreme Court action looms. Texas and New Mexico schemed a water-sharing agreement to settle the thing, but the Department of Interior intervened to say “Nope” …
Given the apparently unproductive state-to-state negotiations over post-2026 management of the Colorado River, it’s worth examining, in our search for a path forward, some of the other proposals submitted to the Department of the Interior. (If you need some bedtime reading….) One of the most interesting comes from the Gila River Indian Community. (Their March …
Continue reading ‘Gila River Indian Community proposal for post-2026 Colorado River Management’ »
Forgotten in all of the noise around the Colorado River right now is this moment of hope – water again flowing in the Colorado River Delta. Under the 2017 agreement between the United States and Mexico known as Minute 323, we have 210,000 acre feet of water set aside for environmental flows through 2026 – …
Continue reading ‘Water Flowing, Again, in the Colorado River Delta’ »