It’s not a full-on “Basin Study” like the Colorado River got, but the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation today announced $84,000 for preliminary work to define the scope of a Middle Rio Grande (that’s lingo for the New Mexico big) basin study. There’s bigger bucks in the announcement for Salinas and Carmel River Basins in California and …
Continue reading ‘Reclamation funding preliminary Rio Grande basin study work’ »
Brett Walton has done us all a great service with a thorough look at the issues surrounding Native American water rights in the Colorado River Basin. Importantly, he’s looking at it not just as a problem, but as an example of what the solution space can look like. The stuff from Kathryn Sorensen, Phoenix’s water …
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I’ve had my head down the last ten days reading and writing about 1940s and ’50s-era Los Angeles water management, and I look up to see that Lake Mead last week dropped below elevation 1,075, a level freighted with meaning. But what meaning, exactly? Drew Beckwith at Western Resource Advocates, in Caitlin McGlade’s story, wins for …
Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on the bathtub ring and Lake Mead’s historic drop below 1,075’ »
In your latest reminder that California agriculture has shown some remarkable capacity to adapt to that state’s crushing drought, Todd Fitchette in Western Farm Press reports that total agricultural farm gate receipts in Kings County, in California’s drought-devastated southern Central Valley, were up 9 percent last year: Kings County agricultural values advanced 9 percent from …
Continue reading ‘Drought adaptive capacity, Kings County CA edition’ »
Los Angeles water, management, circa 1952: There are many reasons for the diminishing underground water supply. Foremost among them, probably, is the vastly increased demand created by an unprecedented population influx and the constant press of industrial expansion. But there are important contributory reasons. Prolonged dry spells of little or no rain leave water-bearing aquifers …
Continue reading ‘Your 1952 Aquifer Queen of Central Water Basin’ »
In this morning’s Arizona Star, Tucson journalist Tony Davis asks, “Is California trying to take our water?” In journalism, there’s a joke known as “Betteridge’s Law“: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” As Tony’s story strongly suggests, the notion making the rounds these days in some Arizona political …
This Alex Breitler story reminds how running out of water is almost invariably as much a problem of governance as much as it is of drought: MOUNTAIN HOUSE — Years before the first shovelful of earth was turned on this master-plan community near Tracy, developers and county officials knew that its sole source of water could …
Continue reading ‘Running out water – again with the governance’ »
My University of New Mexico office is a short walk from the campus Duck Pond, which though it was never an official name, we’ve come to capitalize. It’s a very important place. I often come to campus on Saturdays to write, and on those Saturdays I generally take keyboard breaks to go for a walk. …
On May 1, the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center projected 3 million acre feet of runoff into Lake Powell from Aril 1 through the end of July. This was bad. Then it started raining. On June 1, the forecast was increased to 5 million acre feet. As of late last week, the estimate actual inflow …
You can’t supply unlimited amounts of water to every person for every purpose. – Phil Isenberg, vice chairman of California’s Delta Stewardship Council, in today’s New York Times.