Full caption: Irrigation ditch along the road. Imperial Valley, California; Lange, Dorothea, photographer; 1937 Feb. Lange’s justly famous for her pictures of the people of the Imperial Valley when she travelled there in the late 1930s as a documentarian for the Farm Service Administration. She also took pictures of water. If you want to get lost for …
With Lake Mead water levels dropping, Pat Mulroy is in a race against Mother Nature. That’s how the risks facing by Las Vegas, Nev., were framed this week in a piece in The Henderson Press. But as one of the members of my water geek brain trust, Phil King, likes to point out, reservoir levels …
Here’s a great quote from Carl Hayden. It was June, 1922, still in the early days of the jockeying for development of the Colorado River’s water. Hayden was at the time a relatively junior member of the House, having not yet ascended to the political heights from which decades later, as Arizona’s senior senator, he …
Continue reading ‘Carl Hayden: “water as cheaply as it can be served”’ »
Working on a book chapter about the genesis and importance of the Arizona v. California litigation over the Colorado River, I ran across this priceless little bit of business from 1944. It is Harry Bashore, Comissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, testifying in Phoenix in July of that year, before the a subcommittee of …
Continue reading ‘Drought and Despair: “these enemies of mankind”’ »
It rained kind of a lot in the intermountain west this month, which raises a fascinating question about the tools we use for Colorado River management, and the tendency of water managers and management institutions to base significant actions on median flow forecasts rather than managing with a flexibility that considers the probabilistic nature of …
Continue reading ‘Reduced releases from Lake Powell: no going back’ »
The new header picture on the blog is from the USGS photo archive, attributed to E.C. LaRue, 1921, in Glen Canyon
Henry Brean on Pat Mulroy, arguably the most significant water manager in the Colorado River Basin: She got her bachelor’s degree from UNLV, then stayed on to earn her master’s in German literature. Laugh if you will, she said, but “it’s a great study in human nature, and it’s a great study in political theory.”
Here’s Henry Brean: Long-time Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy is preparing to retire but won’t make a formal announcement until “she’s ready,” Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak said Monday. And Conor Shine: Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy is planning to retire after 22 years on the job. Reached Monday evening, …
Southern California, if I may quote myself, didn’t have enough water to support a city, “so they built three great rivers.” Not one or two. Three aqueducts to carry water to “the southland”, as we called it in my youth. The audacity of that act is captured in this map I stumbled across today, from …
Continue reading ‘The audacity of building rivers: Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct’ »
Antoine Abou-Diwan had an interesting story over the weekend in the Imperial Valley Press suggesting fallowing, rather than more sophisticated agricultural water conservation approaches, has become the default standard for water savings in the Imperial Valley needed to meet the Imperial Irrigation District’s obligations under California’s Quantification Settlement Agreement. Under the QSA, water saved in …
Continue reading ‘Fallowing – the path of least resistance?’ »