In the latest High Country News, Stephen Elliott reports on the tribulations of the Paradox Valley desal unit run by the Bureau of Reclamation to help reduce salt load on the Colorado River: Without the unit’s deep injection, the salt that covers the desert valley floor at Paradox, and the thousands of tons of it …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River salinity program showing its age’ »
Jay Lund, Dr. Water at UC Davis, asks a provocative question that gets to this gnarly question of the status of water saved by conservation measures – what if municipal water users could direct how the savings from their conservation efforts are used? Albuquerque has done extraordinarily well in the last two decades. Per capita …
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., had a go at Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor during a Senate hearing last week, looking for assurances that if his state left unused water in Lake Mead as part of a Colorado River Basin conservation effort, the Interior Department wouldn’t just kype it and give it to someone else (mumble …
Continue reading ‘Arizona, water conservation, and the tragedy of the “paracommons”’ »
I’ll be yammering on about “New Mexico’s Rio Grande: Fate of a 21st Century River“, Oct. 31, 10 a.m., at the Albuquerque Open Space Visitor’s Center. We tried to schedule it for a time when the sandhill cranes had arrived. You’ve already heard me, but the OSVC is one of the best places in town …
Continue reading ‘I’ll be speaking in Albuquerque Oct. 31 about the fate of the Rio Grande’ »
Matt Weiser takes us into the strange world of California municipal water infrastructure finance, where costs are relatively fixed and vendors are trying to sell less of their product: [M]any water agencies are feeling the strain because they had already delayed imposing rate increases for a number of years due to the drought and a …
Continue reading ‘Conservation and the municipal water finance dilemma’ »
This image depicting a years’ worth of Colorado River water use, from an emailer I got from the Southern Nevada Water Authority:
Some thoughts after today’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on federal western California New Mexico etc. drought legislation…. On Congressional process We currently have two “California drought bills” – H.R. 2898Â developed by California House Republicans and S. 1894. They are very different. As a matter of process, the details of the difference don’t …
Continue reading ‘Thoughts on federal drought legislation circa October 2015’ »
In response to reader feedback, here’s my depressing graph of current Lake Mead storage, adapted to be readable on your mobile phone. Yes, there are people now who prefer their bad news on the go! More background here.
It’s one of those milestones that’s an entirely arbitrary result of the units we use to measure, but it’s probably nevertheless worth marking: for the first time since it was filled in the 1930s, Lake Mead ended the “water year” below 10 million acre feet of storage. The finally elevation at midnight last Wednesday, Sept. …
Today’s federal drought monitor for New Mexico passed an important milestone. For the first time since November 2010, more than half the state is completely free of any drought or “abnormally dry” designation: