Archive of posts filed under the New Mexico category.
The problem with drought rhetoric
The Carlsbad Current-Argus yesterday morning had a story saying this: Officials at the National Weather Service in Midland, Texas, say their weather data shows the drought in Eddy County and the surrounding region is on par with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Eddy County has not had any measurable rain since Sept. 25, and …
California Water Governance: Some Questions
I’ve a chance to get out to California later this year and do some reporting on water issues, so I’ve been doing some reading, trying to get a better feel for where to focus my attention. This is in part driven by my belief that the West’s water issues have become inextricably linked, and to …
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Water in the desert – low flows on the Rio Grande
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 …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Watching the History Flow
Watching them bring water to the 300-year-old Duranes irrigation ditch.
One of America’s Great Ballfields
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 upon a time…
Once, an impossibly long long time ago, it rained at my house.
Something Else I Wrote Elsewhere: Supplementing the River
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 …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Moving Water, New Mexico Style
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 …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Year on the Rio Grande
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 …
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