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 …
Update: Tom Pagano points out in the comments, I think correctly, that I’m incorrectly interpreting the data because the most recent data points cover a shorter period of time. So take this with a grain of salt…. ******* At the risk of overanalyzing a single short term data point, the weekly model runs from the …
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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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LAS VEGAS, NEV – Walking up from our hotel to the strip in search of a place to eat last night, battered by neon and flashing lights, my dinner companion commented ruefully on how distant we were from nature. I suppose you could say that in the middle of any city, but in Las Vegas …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Las Vegas edition II’ »
YUMA, ARIZ – On the Lower Colorado River, there are three large municipal water wholesalers behaving with a certain air of desperation in their hunt for long term supplies of water: the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas), the Metropolitan Water District (Southern California) and the Central Arizona Project (Phoenix/Tucson). So who wants it bad? …
LAS VEGAS, NEV – The distance between Morelos Dam on the lower Colorado and the Bellagio Fountain is profound. Morelos spans the U.S.-Mexico border, with the wheat fields and onions of the Yuma County Water Users Association behind me as I took this picture and Algodones on the far bank. Most years, Morelos is where …
YUMA, ARIZ – There’s not much Colorado River left by the time it gets to Yuma, on the U.S.-Mexico border. But the folks here seem to embrace it, modest though it may be. Warm summer evening, and people are out floating, barbecuing, swimming and generally acting like they feel comfortable with their river: From Colorado …