Vegas: Hey, it’s not our fault Lake Mead is dropping!
This image depicting a years’ worth of Colorado River water use, from an emailer I got from the Southern Nevada Water Authority:
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Thoughts on federal drought legislation circa October 2015
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. 2898 developed by California House Republicans and S. 1894. They are very different. As a matter of process, the details of the difference don’t …
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Lake Mead: my depressing graph, now readable on your phone
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.
Lake Mead, for the first time since filling, ends water year below 10 million acre feet
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. …
New Mexico drought conditions best in nearly five years
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:
Happy 80th birthday, Hoover Dam
From his Sept. 30, 1935 speech dedicating what was then called “Boulder Dam,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes: I venture to hope that this dam, with its great storage of health and wealth and happiness for thousands of people, will stand as a definite opening of a new era with respect to the natural …
Why pumping water from the ocean to save the Salton Sea is a bad idea
Brandon Loomis, in an excellent recent piece on the problems of the Salton Sea, quoted a resident along the troubled inland California lake who thinks the answer to its decline is straightforward: Rod Jeffries, a 64-year-old urban refugee from San Francisco, is confident the state will act…. His favored solution is to pipe seawater from …
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A quiet end to the water year on the Rio Grande
Water year 2014-15 is ending with low flows again on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico. (We’ve only had one year since 2000 with above-average flows.) Lissa and I walked out to the Rio Grande in Bernalillo County’s far South Valley this afternoon. The water was low. Low is normal for this time of …
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The purpose of rivers
The century just ended will be recognized as the time when America’s water resources were attacked with all of the sophistication and power that one would expect of an economic and technological superpower. Unruly rivers were straightened and channelized , massive levees and dikes were thrown in the way of encroaching water, cheap electricity was …
thoughts on optimism in western water
In which Sarah Tory interviews me for High Country News about stuff: When John Fleck began covering water (among other things) in 1995 for New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal, he assumed he’d be writing stories about dried out wells and cracked mud. After all, as a Los Angeles native who grew up in a suburb that …