Reading the late 19th and early 20th century literature of the Colorado Desert, one could be forgiven for thinking there was a certain inevitability of the massive irrigation works that so changed the Salton Sink (renamed with characteristic enthusiasm as “Imperial Valley”.) It still seems inevitable. It was the time of manifest destiny, of “reclamation”. …

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A couple of stories recently caught my eye, in which “drought” is blamed for what is largely an issue of water overconsumption. The first was a City News story on San Diego water supply. The reporter said this: California and the Colorado River basin have been in a years-long drought, which has forced reductions in …

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NASA’s Landsat 7 captured this remarkable image of Lake Powell’s decline, as seen from space:

Easy answer to the question asked in the title of this post, right? The last decade is the driest 10-year stretch since record keeping began on the Colorado River. Of course Lake Mead has dropped because of “drought”, right? No. During that entire time, thanks to upstream storage and the fact that Upper Basin consumption …

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Joyce Lobeck reports on yesterday’s festivities in Yuma to mark next week’s start of the Yuma Desalting Plant test run: On Monday, the desalting plant will be started up for a yearlong demonstration run that will produce about 29,000 acre-feet of desalinated water. That means 29,000 acre-feet of water – enough to serve 116,000 people …

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The Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant is scheduled to begin its operational test phase next week. In preparation, a U.S.-Mexican team is ramping up its monitoring efforts at the Cienega de Santa Clara, an accidental wetland in what was once the Colorado River delta. The Cienega is the inadvertent product of U.S. ag drainage …

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There’s a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation graph making the rounds that captures the core issue going forward on the Colorado River Basin. Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand, courtesy USBR I first noticed it in Jennifer Pitt’s congressional testimony in early April. At the “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium I just attended in Las Vegas, …

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The Cienega de Santa Clara, the one remaining major wetland in the Colorado River Delta, is not being drained as a result of Mexico’s 7.2 magnitude earthquake, according to Karl Flessa, the University of Arizona researcher who is part of a team monitoring the ecosystem. The area was hit hard by the earthquake. The San …

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