Shaun McKinnon this morning has the good news that the new Drop 2 reservoir out along the All-American Canal in far southeast California doesn’t leak. Well, actually, the “doesn’t leak” part is not a big surprise, but provides a nice news peg for an update on why this tiny project matters: The $172 million project …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Drop 2 and the hunt for increasingly marginal water’ »
Steve Hannon tells the dramatic story of what nearly happened to Glen Canyon Dam during the great El Niño year of 1983, when heavy winter snows, then rain on that snow, caused Lake Powell to rise rapidly and exposed problems in Glen Canyon Dam’s spillways: The spillways had only operated for a few days when …
Arizona’s on the hunt for new water, and it won’t be cheap. Tony Davis covered this week’s meeting of the folks working on the program with one of my all time favorite government acronyms – Project ADD Water (that’s Acquisition, Development and Delivery). It’s the planning effort among Central Arizona Project players to find new …
You folks have already seen most of this, but for readers of what we call “the print product”, I pulled together today some of my thoughts about the draining of Lake Mead and its implications for New Mexico. I did this (perhaps not coincidentally) as I’ve been pulling together some thoughts to speak tonight at …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: My Visit to Lake Mead’ »
In Colossus, Michael Hiltzik makes nice use of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dedication address 75 years ago atop Hoover Dam. Inspired, I went back and found a copy of the text to pull a quote for a newspaper column. Roosevelt said this: We are here to celebrate the completion of the greatest dam in the world, …
It’s still early in the season, so this doesn’t mean a lot, but it at least means a little (click to blow it up big enough to read – blue line is average, red line is last year, green line is this year to date): This is a handy graph from the Colorado Basin River …
Folks on the Colorado River upstream of Lake Mead are sounding a little nervous. Dennis Webb had a very nice piece in the Grand Junction Sentinel over the weekend taking stock. Meet Colorado rancher Carlyle Currier: When he hears that Lake Mead’s water level is at a historic low, he worries about the degree to …
Osha Gray Davidson, writing about yesterday’s Blythe Solar Power Project announcement, highlights a key issue: [T]he project will now have a much smaller “water footprint” thanks to a decision to use air cooling, which consumes no water, at the cost of somewhat reduced efficiency. Cynthia Barnett, a noted water expert and author, calls the Blythe …
Continue reading ‘Energy and Water in the California Desert’ »
John Wesley Powell, the 19th century explorer, scientist and visionary who first tried to map and explain the West’s water resources, famously argued that government jurisdictions should be established based on watershed boundaries. He was ignored on this point (as he was on others). But I’ve been playing recently with an argument that elaborates on …
Continue reading ‘Powell and Watersheds in the 21st Century’ »
Investors need to take long term water supply risks into account as they think about municipal bonds, according to a new analysis by the environmental-investor group Ceres published this week: The report shows that some of the nation’s largest public utilities may face moderate to severe water supply shortfalls in the coming years, yet these …