Ian James at The Desert Sun has a great Sunday paper deep dive into the stress climate change is placing on Lower Colorado River Basin water, including this observation from John Entsminger, Las Vegas’s new water chief, on the money needed to pursue the solution space: Entsminger, whose Las Vegas water agency is backing the …
Last night, I shared Part I of an interesting discussion by Arizona water managers of the risk facing Lake Mead and Lower Colorado River Basin water users in Nevada, Arizona and California: Absent some big wet years or management intervention, Lake Mead could drop to levels in the next five to eight years that would …
Continue reading ‘What it will take to fix Lake Mead – the Arizona suggestion’ »
update: see also Part II, discussing Arizona’s suggestion regarding what it might take to fix this problem Absent some big wet years or management intervention, Lake Mead could drop to levels in the next five to eight years that would make it nearly unusable – especially for power generation and water for Las Vegas, but …
After spending the day reading about the federal government’s, shall we say, persuasive role in assisting Imperial Valley farmers that it was in their best interests to figure out a way to share a bit of their water across San Gorgonio Pass with the city folk to their west, I this evening ran across this: …
Continue reading ‘In western water, what’s the right role for the feds?’ »
If I wanted to make mischief, I’d write a blog post pointing out that Lake Mead ended May at a historic low right after release of 105,392 acre feet of water for a historic environmental flow through the Colorado River Delta. I’d calculate how much higher Lake Mead would be if that 105,392 acre feet …
Continue reading ‘That thing I wrote about Lake Mead being the lowest ever turned out to be true’ »
Black Canyon on the Colorado River, from the 1871 Wheeler survey, courtesy USGS. This is the area eventually chosen some years later for what was called Boulder or Hoover Dam:
Unless tropical depression Amanda does something miraculous, and quickly, Lake Mead will end May at its lowest level for this point in the year since Elwood Mead and his buddies filled the reservoir in the 1930s, 20 feet in surface elevation below last year at this time. The “tropical storm Amanda” thing was a joke. …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead: lowest end-of-May levels in history’ »
I suppose if you work this image from yesterday’s Landsat pass over the Colorado River Delta hard enough, you could find a path of wet connection between river and sea: Image courtesy USGS Earth Explorer
When I first ran across the rantings of George Maxwell as the Colorado River Compact was being developed in the 1920s, their racism seemed almost comical. Here he is in a written submission to the 14th Meeting of the Colorado River Commission, Nov. 13, 1922 (pdf from University of Colorado): The flood menace must not …
Continue reading ‘George Maxwell, Colorado River irrigation and the “Asiatic menace”’ »
In no part of the wide world is there a place where Nature had provided so perfectly for a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation as in that place where the Colorado River flows uselessly past the international desert. – William Smythe, Sunset Mangazine, 1900, quoted in Eric Boime, “Beating Plowshares into Swords”: The Colorado …
Continue reading ‘a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation’ »