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 …
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)
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 …
Continue reading ‘Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?’ »
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, …
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 …
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?)
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 …
Continue reading ‘sublimity perhaps unparalleled in any part of the world’ »
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 …