The San Diego Air And Space Museum posted some wonderful old aerial pictures of Hoover Dam on Flickr, and I’m hoping someone in the Inkstain posse can help me sort out the history. This image was taken by Colonel Orie W. Coyle, and appears to be a test of Hoover Dam’s outlet jets that I’m thinking …
In the Colorado River Basin writ large, 14,000 acre feet of water is a very small rounding error – less than one tenth of one percent of the river’s flow. But the New Mexico discussion over the possibility of a diversion high in the watershed of the Gila River in New Mexico, raises fascinating questions …
Former Southern Nevada water chief Pat Mulroy explains that, while Las Vegas is an easy rhetorical landing spot because it is right next door to Lake Mead, the dropping Colorado River reservoir is a basin wide issue: What we are experiencing is not a Las Vegas problem — it is truly a regional problem that …
Continue reading ‘Mulroy: Lake Mead’s bathtub ring is not just Las Vegas’s problem’ »
Even with the fizzling El Niño forecast, the winter outlook for the United States released by the Climate Prediction Center yesterday looks awfully El Niño-like, with odds favoring wetter weather across the southern tier of states. But for the bulk of the Colorado River Basin’s water-producing region, which is in the central Rockies, the forecast looks …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Basin forecast for the winter of 2014-15: “meh”’ »
On KNME’s In Focus with historian Sonia Dickey and the Bureau of Reclamation’s Mike Hamman, talking about the risks and possibilities of our western water future:
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s key August forecast, out today (pdf),projects that there will be enough water in the Colorado River system next year to release a bonus pulse of 770,000 acre feet of water from Lake Powell down to lake Mead above and beyond the legal requirements of the Colorado River Compact. But even with …
Continue reading ‘Bonus water likely for Lake Mead in 2015, but it’ll just keep dropping anyway’ »
On the scale of Colorado River water diversions yet unbuilt, the possibility of taking water out of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico is small stuff – 14,000 acre feet per year, or maybe less if the water’s simply not there. But the current debate in New Mexico illustrates a common refrain as western …
Continue reading ‘USBR: Gila diversion costs exceed benefits’ »
Water released from Lake Mead, through Hoover Dam’s turbines, travels downstream about 150 miles to Lake Havasu. There, massive pumps on the river’s left bank push the water up on the start of a 336 mile journey that ends in groundwater spreading basins west of Tucson. The Colorado River’s water then recharges an aquifer, where …
Most of the land in these reservations is and always has been arid. If the water necessary to sustain life is to be had, it must come from the Colorado River or its tributaries. It can be said without overstatement that when the Indians were put on these reservations they were not considered to be …
Continue reading ‘Annals of Indian water: “hot, scorching sands”’ »
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal: “You’ve got to deal with people, farmers, companies, everyone,” Sandra Postel told me last week when I asked about the work she’s doing trying to find environmentally sustainable solutions to western North America’s water problems. In other words, you’ve got to cooperate.