I’ve been spending a lot of my work days of late in a blow-by-blow rundown of the growing drought conditions in New Mexico: An already dismal forecast for spring runoff in New Mexico’s rivers has gotten worse, after a dry, windy March sapped the state’s snowpack. Spring and summer flow on the Rio Grande into …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert – low flows on the Rio Grande’ »
Watching them bring water to the 300-year-old Duranes irrigation ditch.
Many years ago, as a young pup of a reporter, I was sent to Madrid, NM, on a quiet Saturday to chronicle an old-timers day in the old mining town-turned art colony. Madrid’s community center sits next to the Oscar Huber Ballpark which, legend has it, was the first lighted baseball field west of the …
Once, an impossibly long long time ago, it rained at my house.
Also from this morning’s paper, a story documenting Albuquerque’s 60th consecutive day without measurable precipitation. We’ve got an outside chance of breaking the streak this evening, and then again mid-week. But the forecasts are basically bleak. But the real import was tucked in near the end of the story (sub/ad req): Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau …
Continue reading ‘Something Else I Wrote Elsewhere: Supplementing the River’ »
From the Sunday Journal, a look at two proposals to pump and pipe water from rural New Mexico to the state’s rapidly developing Rio Grande corridor (sub/ad req): Ray Pittman pulled his 1994 F-150 pickup to the top of a thinly wooded hill, a short walk from the water tank he built back in 1999 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Moving Water, New Mexico Style’ »
From Thursday’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a look at what is increasingly looking to be a very dry year on the Rio Grande, which has become entangled in a Byzantine governance issue involving allocation and distribution of Lower Rio Grande water: In recent years, dry conditions have made managing the river more difficult. Eight out of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Year on the Rio Grande’ »
Spending a weekend (mostly) unplugged (I’m writing this on my iPod), Lissa and I ended up this afternoon at the Georgia O’Keeffe in Santa Fe. In one alcove, photos of O’Keeffe on the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, circa 1964 – the year they closed the dam and began flooding it. Apparently her friend Eliot …
From the morning paper (sub/ad req): Groundwater contamination from a Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill has spread farther than previously believed, according to a report presented to municipal water officials Wednesday. A new test well drilled by the Air Force last year beneath a southeast Albuquerque neighborhood shows evidence of contamination, two blocks …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: latest on the jet fuel plume’ »
Another happy discovery from the hard drive cleanup project. I’m thinking this is from 2003 or ’04, maybe?