I suppose it’s a sign of the times on the Colorado River that a January forecast of 95 percent of average flow into Lake Powell counts as good news. Since green on the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center map runs from 90 to 110 percent, we get green. It’s only a little bit below average! …
Continue reading ‘For now, some breathing room on the Colorado River’ »
Three years ago John Leeper, then head of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, told me about the importance of the deal that assigns long-neglected water rights along with the money to bring the water to arid eastern side of the reservation: “Real water to real people in real time.” Last week Roberto Rosales …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: real water, real people’ »
“For certain specific purposes, and, primarily among them, for pumping water in moderate quantities, the windmill is not only a thoroughly reliable, but at the same time the most economical prime mover, and as far as judgment can now be passed, will hold this place for many years to come.” – Alfred R. Wolff, The …
In Southern California, the link between weather and water has been inextricably broken. Here’s Bettina Boxall on why L.A.’s driest year, ever, doesn’t matter all that much: Although this year’s No. 1 ranking makes for an interesting conversation piece, it has little practical effect. As anyone driving around Los Angeles can see, lawns are still …
Reed Benson: [I]n places where there is no river-dependent species listed as threatened or endangered, environmental factors often carry little weight in water management. Without a listed species, water allocation and management often ignore the health of the river. And even where listed species do exist, focusing on the needs of a single species (as …
Continue reading ‘The shortcomings of the Endangered Species Act in western water’ »
When you sell less water, you make less money selling water. It’s the modern water agency dilemma: Albuquerque’s municipal water agency may need another rate increase to dig out of a growing financial hole left by the community’s water conservation success, agency officials acknowledged in a report this week to their board.
I wrote a story in this morning’s newspaper about New Mexico’s efforts to revive its moribund state water planning process: Ten years after New Mexico officials last took a stab at developing a state water plan, they are reviving their effort to calculate the gaps between New Mexico’s finite water supplies and the needs of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico water planning’ »
Reed Benson, a University of New Mexico law professor whose patient explanations and deep writing have been extraordinarily helpful to my understand of things like the doctrine of prior appropriation and the Endangered Species Act, has joined the blogoworld: It has come to my attention … that a lot of people do not read law …
Continue reading ‘Here’s a new western water blog worth adding to your RSS feed’ »
From the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Yuma, Ariz., and El Centro, Calif., had the highest unemployment rates in October, 31.9 percent and 25.2 percent, respectively. These folks are getting a lot of Colorado River water. There’s seasonality to the resulting ag work economies, but really, this is a graph of economic suckage: