There’s a newsroom joke that “we don’t write about planes that don’t crash,” but I think it’s important to think carefully about societal systems that succeed, because lessons learned matter: The flood pulse was impressive. But it is instructive to look at how much larger it would have been if not for a pair of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the flood that wasn’t’ »
A snowy egret showed up this afternoon amid the turtles sunning themselves on the Rio Grande Nature Center’s pond. We took some pictures. [slideshow_deploy id=’8238′]
From the work blog: Corky Herkenhoff, who’s been farming at San Acacia for half a century, told me he can tell where the runoff is coming from by the smell. San Acacia sits just below the Rio Puerco and Rio Salado, two generally dry tributaries that have been pumping water into the Rio Grande over …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the Rio’s smell’ »
In the midst of a very unusual storm (see my newspaper explanation of its unusualness here), I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours watching a big slug of water make its way down the Rio Grande Valley in which Albuquerque sits. A source yesterday afternoon pointed me to the readings on the USGS San …
Continue reading ‘Chasing water in the desert: the great Rio Grande “flood” of 2013’ »
From yesterday’s newspaper: The (San Juan) basin, in northwestern New Mexico, has every competing water interest you’d want in the mix if you were creating a recipe for conflict: Native American water rights (the Navajo and Jicarilla Apache nations), endangered species (the Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker), farming large and small, city water use and …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: water management tools we learned in kindergarten’ »
Albuquerque’s Rio Grande is currently not much of a river. Lissa and I made the rounds this afternoon of a few Rio Grande viewpoints. This is from Albuquerque’s West Bluff neighborhood, on the west side of the river north of downtown. The bridge in the distance is Montaño. With an abysmal snowpack, the river was …
From the morning paper, the fruits of a trip to Farmington, in northwest New Mexico, for a legislative hearing on water. Among the items on the agenda, water use in oil and gas production: The problem, according to Egolf and others, is that the state lacks comprehensive data on how much water is being used …
State regulators are pushing the Air Force to do more, and more quickly, to cleanup spill aviation fuel that has fouled Albuquerque groundwater. My story.
A visit to Santo Domingo Pueblo yesterday morning to look at irrigation efficiency work funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and others offered a nice demonstration of the paradox of ag water conservation. From my story (behind a Google survey wall, sorry): By using the pueblo’s irrigation supplies more efficiently, the project, funded by …
I’ll be on the radio Saturday at 9 a.m. with Katie Stone on KUNM’s Children’s Hour (one of the great Albuquerque media institutions) explaining Albuquerque’s aquifer. Streaming live on line or on your mobile device.