Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
For the water geeks in the audience, I highly recommend this movie, which my sister, Lisa, Netflixed for us this weekend: (h/t Karl Flessa for suggesting it)
Archive of posts filed under the Colorado River category.
Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?
There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law. First Price: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that …
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Thinking About Aridity
Here’s a nice way of thinking about aridity: If all the water that flows in each river during an average year were spread evenly over the area drained by the river, the depths would be: Delaware 20.9 in.; Columbia 13.1 in.; Mississippi 6.7 in.; Colorado 1.15 in. Source: Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin, …
The Colorado, Then and Now
I’m reading Frank Waters’ The Colorado, which offers an odd vantage point on the history of the river basin. It was written in 1946 when, as Waters points out in an introduction written when it was republished in the mid-1980s, Phoenix was the only city in the basin of any heft whatsoever. It is clear …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the Mulroy-NM Connection
An explanation (justification?) for why the NM water reporter is paying so much attention to the Vegas water story. (It’s a bit of a fib. Really it’s just a fascinating story, and the NM angle is cheap. But this is just between you and me. You won’t tell my editors, right?)
sublimity perhaps unparalleled in any part of the world
When U.S. Army Lt. J.C. Ives explored the lower reaches of the Colorado River in 1857-58, he made careful efforts to record as much of what he saw and learned as possible, “it being doubtful whether any party will ever again pursue the same line of travel.” Ives wrote: The region explored after leaving the …
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E.C. LaRue
Just Add Water
I was interviewing a local flood control engineer recently about the lovely little wetland that’s grown up in a retention pond up near my work. It’s located just off one of the channels that carries flood flows down through the city, and its primary purpose is to catch and hold water for a while to …
It’s Vegas, Baby
I don’t know if anyone else reads this stuff, or if we’re just talking to one another, but a quartet of the waterbloggers piled on a today on the Vegas (Nev.) water situation. The back story involves Southern Nevada water impresario Pat Mulroy, who wants to bring water across the state to feed her growing …
Cadiz
I’ve been out of the loop for much of the last week, and at this point it’s likely that everyone who follows western water issues has already seen Emily Green’s post on the Cadiz groundwater project. If you haven’t, I recommend it. Cadiz is the proposal to do something that is a bit murky with …