The Book Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. So here’s the book. Box arrived today. I’d wrestled with its words and pictures separately, seen the proofs, but there’s something about holding it in my hands…. Available for pre-order on Amazon (click the link in the right-hand rail) if you’ve got middle-school aged kids in your orbit who …
A lack of precision in the way I worded a post last week on reservoir levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead seems to have led to some confusion. I was writing about the rising levels in Lake Powell as Lake Mead was dropping, and suggested this was the result of a management decision rather …
Continue reading ‘A Clarification on the Mead-Powell Data’ »
Here’s a question for the western water wonks in the audience. During a time of unprecedented population growth in the west, we just went through the driest 10-year stretch on the Colorado since record-keeping began. And no one had their water turned off. What does this say about the systems we have in place to …
Continue reading ‘On the Colorado, Are We Doing Better Than I Thought?’ »
With the 2009 “water year” just completed, it’s time to take stock. The decade just completed, 2000-2009, is the driest 10-year period in the Colorado River Basin in the record, according to preliminary data in the latest draft of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Annual Operating Plan, a compendium of past data on the …
Total storage in Lake Mead at the end of September (the end of the western “water year”) was lower than it’s been since they first filled it in the 1940s. But this is a bit more complicated than that stark statement might appear. If you click through to look at a larger version of the …
The Salton Sea is a fascinating case study in the cultural ambiguity of “nature”. Created in 1905 when the Colorado River found a hole in a poorly constructed irrigation intake and flooded low-lying California desert, the Sea has been sustained – sort of – by agricultural runoff. So it’s not at all “natural” by one …
Shaun McKinnon has a must-read story for those interested in western water in today’s Arizona Republic about the discussion in his state about the future of agricultural and municipal water use: As Phoenix grew, the land available for farms shrank and water use shifted. As recently as 1965, 80 percent of the water delivered by …
I’m always intrigued at the chance to see the price of a water transaction in the West. Usually it’s hidden, but a transaction being discussed among some Colorado River Communities offers this glimpse. From Jim Seckler’s story in the Mohave Daily News: George said the plan would be for the MCWA to keep 500-acre feet …
It’s only Monday, but I think Tim Brick nails it: If we look to the future, the Colorado River will not be a reliable source of water.
Coal burning and water supplies are integrally linked in the southwestern United States. When the Central Arizona Project was built in the 1960s, planners hoped to build hydroelectric power plants on the main stem of the Colorado River to generate the power to lift the artificial river they were building up a total of nearly …