Crownpoint, New Mexico, is one of those places that makes clear the extent to which water (or its lack) constrains human geography. Lissa and I drove out Friday evening to the monthly Crownpoint Navajo Rug Auction. Crownpoint’s the biggest city on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation, but at a population of 2,500, it’s …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: Crownpoint, New Mexico’ »
I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole “water flows uphill toward money” thing is not only wrong, but that its wrongness is problematic. It’s one of those intellectual shortcuts that can be dashed off uncritically, and audiences nod knowingly because of course water flows uphill toward money we all know that, and no further analysis is …
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That thunderstorm that woke most of us up early this morning (lightning flashes through our skylight at 1:30 a.m.) was one for the record books. At the National Weather Service’s airport gauge (the “official” Albuquerque gauge), 2.24 inches (5.7 cm). According to Brian Guyer at the Weather Service, that’s the single highest 24-hour total in history:
It’s not a full-on “Basin Study” like the Colorado River got, but the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation today announced $84,000 for preliminary work to define the scope of a Middle Rio Grande (that’s lingo for the New Mexico big) basin study. There’s bigger bucks in the announcement for Salinas and Carmel River Basins in California and …
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My University of New Mexico office is a short walk from the campus Duck Pond, which though it was never an official name, we’ve come to capitalize. It’s a very important place. I often come to campus on Saturdays to write, and on those Saturdays I generally take keyboard breaks to go for a walk. …
By the powers invested in my by no one in particular, I hereby declare Albuquerque’s 2015 Monsoon Season underway. The weather radar is showing blobs of color in the high country to the southwest, there are high clouds popping up above the mountains to the east of the city, but the real clue was how …
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Before I went on the Children’s Hour this morning on KUNM (archived for now here, go to June 20, 9 a.m.), I looked at a few graphs. Here’s the first – Albuquerque precipitation since Oct. 1. It’s the accumulated precip on the Y axis, date on the x. The brown line is mean, the green …
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 …
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Going through files recently, I ran across this fascinating little bit of New Mexico water policy documentary history. It’s from 2011, when the Audubon Society and the Elephant Butte Irrigation District were trying to figure out a way to collaborate on a habitat restoration project on the Lower Rio Grande. The idea was to lease …
Many Navajo homes lack running water. Many more draw from shallow wells with poor quality water and resulting health problems. Now, my friends Olivier Uyttebrouck and Roberto Rosales report, this community could also lose its hauler, the grandma who trucks in the only clean water available: As she pulls up outside a house, residents quickly …