Back in the 1970s, Congress asked the Bureau of Reclamation to study the feasibility of extending a water line across western New Mexico to carry water from the San Juan River to Gallup, New Mexico. Gallup’s a desert city, dependent on a limited aquifer. Gallup sits on the edge of the Navajo Reservation. The Navajos …
Continue reading ‘Navajo-Gallup Water Project Moves Several Inches Forward’ »
A blog post showed up in my Colorado River news feed, about a winery on the west slope in Colorado, that is irrigated with water from “the infamous Colorado River” (emphasis added) What an odd way of describing the Colorado. Is the great muddy lifeline of the West really “notoriously evil,” “having a reputation of …
Tom Beal has a story in the Arizona Daily Star that captures a couple of related realities one finds these days in the western water community. One is that climate change is the real deal. It’s easy to go on quibbling about the attribution problem, but the Colorado River is mostly drier these days than …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead’ »
The experimental restart of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant, which should get underway after the first of the year, is more than a technical experiment in operating the big desalination equipment. It is, I think more importantly, a fascinating experiment in cross-border collaboration, as I describe in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req): Beginning …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Colorado River Delta’ »
I love history as a journalistic storytelling technique for two reasons. First, it often can provide built-in context. Second, it can provide a natural narrative arc. So when I sat down Friday with Mike Connor, the new head of the Bureau of Reclamation, I tried to frame his job today in terms of the western …
The AP’s Ben Neary has a significant story this weekend about a Bureau of Reclamation analysis of how much water really is available from the Green River for an interbasin transfer being proposed by entrepreneur Aaron Million. Million thinks there is a quarter of a million acre feet a year available. While studies are ongoing, …
Continue reading ‘BuRec: Not Enough In Green River For Transfer Scheme’ »
Occasionally for lunch I slip away from the office, grab a sandwich from one of the places across the street, and head over to a little flood control pond about a mile from my office to check out the birds. The sandwiches are messy, and inevitably little bits of lettuce spill out on the ground …
When I started making noises about some sort of Colorado River project, one of the water wonks I know pointed me toward the delta, arguing it was a) central to understanding the Colorado, and b) widely ignored. The problem, in short, is that essentially no fresh water flows there any more. An ecosystem once sustained …
I spend a lot of time these days reading water news. When I read something good, I often blurt it out on my twitter feed, which is good for that sort of link sharing. But one of the problems with the disjointed nature of social media right now is the way different communities use different …
I’m puzzling over the real story of Oliver Meredith Wozencraft, the chap who was arguably the first person to imagine the large-scale irrigation of the deserts of the southwest with water from the Colorado River. Wozencraft was a physician who came west in 1849 in search of gold and stumbled instead (apparently quite literally) onto …