Earlier this month, Henry Brean described Pat Mulroy’s bold proposal: The general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority said now may be the time to take a serious look at a decades-old idea of capturing floodwater from the Mississippi River and using it to recharge the massive groundwater aquifer beneath the Central Plains. In …
One of the problems with courts deciding important political or policy questions on procedural grounds is that the substantive issues remain unresolved. Instead, we get more process. Such, it seems, is the case with today’s decision by the Nevada Supreme Court to invalidate Las Vegas’s applications for rights to fill its urban pipeline with rural …
Reading slides from a presentation by Colorado River Water Conservation District general counsel Peter Fleming, I ran across a rule of thumb governing water politics there, the “80/20 rule”: 80 percent of the water is west of the continental divide, and 20 percent is east. For population, the numbers are reversed. This seems a useful …
You know you’ve reached a milestone in a western water war of words when the aggrieved party invokes the name of William Mulholland. Such is the case today in discussions over a proposal to pipe a gobzillion acre feet of water across the continental divide to the growing cities in Colorado’s front range. And it’s …
Continue reading ‘Cue Mulholland Reference: Trash-Talking Water on the Upper Colorado’ »
From the work blog, a quick look at how the Storms of the Decade have been playing out in terms of western snowpack. In short: it’s raining like hell where all the people live, but the upper Colorado Basin, which feeds Lake Powell, has been pretty much left out with the exception of a blast …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Storms, the Snowpack’ »
The folks at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have crunched the numbers on how the latest 2010 Colorado River runoff forecast will affect the river’s major storage reservoirs, and the news is not good for Lake Mead. At this point, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, there is just a one in five chance that …
Continue reading ‘Chances of Extra Water for Mead Diminish’ »
Tony Davis reports in this morning’s Arizona Daily Star that the Central Arizona Project could see a shortage in its Colorado River allocation by 2012: For decades, most water experts have expected the Central Arizona Project to eventually run short, as population growth outstripped the supply of the Colorado River that long ago was over-allocated …
Continue reading ‘Arizona Could See Colorado Shortage by 2012’ »
The January Colorado River forecast for 2009-10, out last Friday, is the lowest at this point in the year since 2002-03: The range of uncertainty right now is enormous. In an average year, about 8 million acre feet flows into Lake Powell in the April-July period, which is the peak of the runoff season. This …
It has long been apparent that the water supply of the Colorado is inadequate for all the demands that will be made upon it, as is the case with many other streams in the West. That is G.E.P. Smith of the University of Arizona, writing in the Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers …
As an addendum to Emily Green’s year-end look at Lake Mead (High good, low bad) I’d like to extend the analysis back a bit farther in time. Emily points out that, while population has risen over the past decade in the region served by Mead (one of the two large storage reservoirs on the Colorado), …