The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s board will take up a proposal this Thursday to ship 150,000 acre feet of Las Vegas’s unused Colorado River water to Southern California to help out during California’s epic drought. The water will help the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California make up for shortfalls in its supplies from Northern …
I assume this bluff above Palisade, Colorado, explains the name: Those are peach trees in the foreground, irrigated by water from the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, which first turned water in 1904 onto what a friend calls “as fertile a swath of God’s green earth as there is in the West.” The district’s water now …
Continue reading ‘A Colorado River water use I can get behind: Palisade peaches’ »
The question of what is included in the “Colorado River Basin” is in part a legal one. The seven-state Colorado River Compact of 1922 defined a weird legal geography: [T]he term “Colorado River Basin” means all of the drainage area of the Colorado River System and all other territory within the United States of America …
Continue reading ‘Grand Junction: A view from higher up in the watershed’ »
Mike Cohen, writing for National Geographic’s “Water Currents”, explains what’s at stake in the current discussions over what to do to mitigate reduced flows to the Salton Sea as ag water conservation efforts in Imperial Valley grow: The shrinking Salton Sea will expose tens of thousands of acres of lakebed. The dry lakebed could emit …
Continue reading ‘Cohen sees signs for Salton Sea optimism’ »
Lauren Steely: For a century, water management in the West was an engineering profession. Now it must be an economics profession.
I don’t remember exactly where this is. It was a short walk down an arroyo from US95, the two-lane that runs north from Blythe along the Colorado River to Parker. The farming here is all on the Arizona side of the river. This was all underwater during the river’s pre-dam spring high flows, big desert …
Continue reading ‘Couldn’t’ve had boat docks here before they built Hoover Dam’ »
Some useful insights from Dustin Garrick on water management lessons the western United States can learn from Australia: Australia’s experience shows that water markets have an important role to play. But they are a servant of sound governance, not the master. Above all, markets are certainly not free, nor are they self-sustaining. Like a marriage, …
Continue reading ‘Water markets: “a servant of sound governance, not the master”’ »
Just when I think I’ve got the Colorado River Basin’s problems all sorted out, I keep bumping up against this crazy Salton Sea thing. This USDA Cropscape landcover map really nicely illustrates the geography of the thing. The brightly colored bits are the irrigated agriculture of the Imperial Irrigation District. Agricultural runoff flows to the …
Continue reading ‘California names someone to solve the Salton Sea mess’ »
That long, painful drip-drip-drip of “when will we have Lower Colorado River shortage?” has been pushed out again, with a new set of modeling runs from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation putting the odds at one in five in 2017 and 50-50 by 2018. Hidden in that “one in five” next year is some good …
Continue reading ‘One in five chance of Colorado River shortage in 2017, 50-50 by 2018’ »
This is something we’ve seen in Albuquerque over the last two decades of remarkable municipal water conservation success: revenue shortfalls with the old business model of selling water and, ickier, a change in what my UNM colleague Bruce Thomson calls “turd mechanics”. Matt Stevens in the LA Times: Shorter showers, more efficient toilets and other …
Continue reading ‘Water conservation = less water to move our poo’ »