For the second year in a row, New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project contractors (the biggest of which are the Albuquerque and Santa Fe metro areas) won’t get their full allocation of Colorado River Basin transboundary deliveries this year. But with the amazingly wet May and June, it could have been a whole lot worse. I’m …
Continue reading ‘San Juan-Chama project shortfall (trust me, it’s good news!)’ »
Your friendly reminder: don’t freak out when Lake Mead drops below surface elevation 1,075 in the next few days. We don’t have a Lower Colorado River Basin “shortage”* yet, and likely won’t have for a couple more years. What counts is the August forecast of the January 1 level. Mead is forecast to drop below …
Continue reading ‘Friendly reminder: don’t freak out when Lake Mead drops below 1,075’ »
The University of Colorado’s Doug Kenney, who tends to be pessimistic about the Colorado River Basin’s water management problems, did find something optimistic to say in a Guardian op ed today: The situation isn’t hopeless. In Southern California, for example, the massive Imperial Irrigation District transfers water to drought-stricken communities in Los Angeles and San …
Fiction can provide a useful framework for thinking through alternative approaches to real problems. In that regard, I’m enjoying Paolo Bacigalupi’s new novel The Water Knife. Set in the near future Colorado River Basin, the book makes water management seem genuinely exciting. I’ll avoid spoilers, but try to give some flavor. The opening scene involves the …
Continue reading ‘Water policy innovation in Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Water Knife”’ »
In the fall of 1934, Arizona Gov. Benjamin Moeur dispatched the Arizona National Guard to the banks of the Colorado River near its junction with the Bill Williams to try to block efforts to build what would eventually become Parker Dam. Their fear: that the Colorado River Aqueduct, which would tap into the new reservoir, …
Continue reading ‘Arizona – a century of fear that California wants to steal its water’ »
So this is happening Friday afternoon in Boulder, Colo., at the annual University of Colorado Martz Summer Conference of Water Law and Policy Nerds: I’ll talk about social capital and adaptive capacity some, and try to make it clear that I was paying attention to the rest of the conference, but mostly I’ll just …
Continue reading ‘Friday in Boulder, I will be optimistic’ »
A month that Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in western Colorado called a “miracle May” has left the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs in much better shape than we might have expected given the glum projections of doomsayers like me. Precipitation across the Colorado River Basin has been well above average, …
Minute 242, an addenda to the U.S.-Mexico Colorado River Treaty, (pdf) contemplated construction of a drain to safely carry high salinity U.S. drainage past municipal and agricultural intakes and dump it into a slough near the Sea of Cortez. It was a time of tension between the two countries over the salinity issue. (Evan Ward’s …
Folks worried that Lake Mead might drop below elevation 1,075 and trigger a first-ever Lower Colorado River Basin shortage now have more to worry about. The latest monthly model runs from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (pdf) have increased the odds, and suggest that Mead (currently at 1,077.03) could drop all the way to 1,054 by …
In Phoenix for a meeting, I had a couple of hours’ hole in my schedule and skipped out to the “Gilbert Water Ranch”. It’s an interesting example of what the water management solution space looks like in arid central Arizona. It’s a series of groundwater recharge basins in the Phoenix suburb – both treated municipal …