“Collaboration is a much better way of working than litigation.” – Estevan López, Commissioner, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, during today’s festivities marking the tenth anniversary of the Multi-Species Conservation Program on the Lower Colorado River. Jerry Zimmerman, former executive director of the Colorado River Board of California, told a story this morning about how the …
Continue reading ‘Habitat conservation on the Lower Colorado’ »
I spent much of today in Bard, which is one of the oldest western U.S. irrigation projects of the modern era. It’s modest – about 15,000 irrigated acres, roughly half on the Quechan Indian reservation and half non-Indian land, on the California side, just across the Colorado River from Yuma. Medjool dates are a thing …
Continue reading ‘In the Reservation Canal, a full supply’ »
It’s looking increasingly likely that some of this year’s “bonus water”, extra releases from Glen Canyon Dam to bolster supplies in Lake Mead outside Las Vegas, is evaporating with our dwindling Rocky Mountain snowpack. The folks at the Bureau of Reclamation have been careful since the beginning in telling us that the bonus water was …
Continue reading ‘The impact of our disappearing snowpack on Lake Mead’ »
“Over this bridge drought refugees are crossing the Colorado River into California.” – Dorothea Lange, 1935 One more great bit of American history as I get ready to head off to Yuma. I love this picture. From the Library of Congress’s remarkable collection of Dorothea Lange’s work in the American Desert during the Depression.
Getting ready for a reporting trip next week to Yuma, I’ve had occasion to revisit a recent favorite Colorado River water book, Robert Sauder’s The Yuma Reclamation Project. Yuma is the last thing the Colorado River sees as it leaves the United States and disappears into the agricultural diversion canals of the Mexicali Valley, there …
The April-July runoff forecast into Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, is just 52 percent of the long term mean, according to new numbers out today from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. That is roughly 1.3 million acre feet less water flowing into Lake Powell than the forecast of just a month ago, the …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Basin forecast: where’d that 1.3 million acre feet go?’ »
A guest post of sorts* from a group of prominent economists here in the western United States questioning the findings in a widely quoted report (pdf here) by a group from Arizona State about the potential economic impact if the Colorado River went dry: *********** A January 14th article in the Wall Street Journal reported …
Continue reading ‘Exaggerated Impacts of Unrealistic Water Shortages’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation today named Brent Rhees to head its Salt Lake City-based Upper Colorado office: As deputy regional director, Rhees managed several complex and high profile issues, including the Middle Rio Grande Endangered Species Collaborative Program, dam safety modifications, implementation of the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, the Colorado River Salinity Control Program and …
Continue reading ‘Rhees to head USBR Upper Colorado office’ »
Water journalist Brett Walton wrote a lovely piece about finally meeting the Colorado River for the first time: I have reported on the Colorado River for five years. I know it as a legal argument, as a topographic feature, as an obstacle, and as a matrix of charts, calculations, and grim projections. I’ve read its …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado – as human construct, and face to flow’ »
Dean Farr Farrell has made a great visualization tool of western U.S. reservoir levels.