If you blow this picture up enough, you can probably see pixels of rock that have not been exposed since the 1930s. Or maybe not. The surface elevation of Lake Mead hit 1083.18 feet above sea level today between 11 a.m. and noon Pacific time today, when this picture was taken. That is below the …
KINGMAN, ARIZ. – I made a beeline across two states today, heading for Lake Mead to watch history happen. It looks as though sometime tomorrow (Sun. 10/17) or Monday, depending on the weather and releases from Hoover Dam for power generation and downstream water users, the surface level of Lake Mead will drop below 1083.19 …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Kingman, Ariz., edition’ »
I’m about to head off for a few days to watch Lake Mead drop, and for some reason thoughts turned this evening to G.K. Gilbert. Tomorrow is “blog action day“, and the subject is “water”, a topic about which I’ve had a few things to say of late. I’m frankly not all that excited about …
Major water project development in the western US has always depended on federal subsidies. One can view those subsidies in a number of different ways – a boondoggle propping up rich ag interests, a foolish lack of clarity about what it really means to build a society in the arid lands, or a reasonable federal …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Will Utah Project be Scuttled?’ »
I’ve written before about the possibility that we could view Australia’s struggles with long term drought, especially in the Murray-Darling Basin, as a model for how to deal with things here in the arid southwest. This version of the model is perhaps not quite so hopeful. From Australian Broadcasting: A guide for water allocations in …
“Water year” 2010 ends next week, making this a good time to take stock of our historic position on the Colorado River. And by a couple of different measures, things are truly historic: The latest forecast (and right now forecasting amounts to tiny fractions of in inch) puts Lake Mead’s surface elevation at 1084.14 feet …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: End of the Water Year, Taking Stock’ »
In a debate between candidates for Colorado Congressional District 3 (the western part of the state, including the west slope and Colorado river), the two candidates are reported to have shown clear agreement on an important point: Both pledged heartily to fight all efforts to reopen the Colorado River Compact. Also, all efforts to switch …
Continue reading ‘The Politics of the Colorado River Compact’ »
With La Niña rapidly strengthening, it is reasonable to ask what can be said about the resulting effect on flows in the Colorado River. The short answer: not much. It is reasonable to guess otherwise, because so much of the southwest depends on the Colorado for its water supply, and because La Niña is so …
Lissa found a treasure for me at Sam Weller’s in Salt Lake City – the March 1956 issue of Arizona Highways: Among the gems within is Ak Akvik’s Servant of the People (tribute to Hoover Dam). An excerpt: Below, stilled forever the red rage of the angry river. Below, in blue serenity, as docile as …
Speaking at a symposium in Las Vegas in April, former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Bob Johnson made a critical point about the differences between water problems on the Colorado River and the current struggles in the southeast over the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river basins. The ACT-ACF fights made the Economist this week, in an article …