Full caption: Irrigation ditch along the road. Imperial Valley, California; Lange, Dorothea, photographer; 1937 Feb. Lange’s justly famous for her pictures of the people of the Imperial Valley when she travelled there in the late 1930s as a documentarian for the Farm Service Administration. She also took pictures of water. If you want to get lost for …
With Lake Mead water levels dropping, Pat Mulroy is in a race against Mother Nature. That’s how the risks facing by Las Vegas, Nev., were framed this week in a piece in The Henderson Press. But as one of the members of my water geek brain trust, Phil King, likes to point out, reservoir levels …
Here’s a great quote from Carl Hayden. It was June, 1922, still in the early days of the jockeying for development of the Colorado River’s water. Hayden was at the time a relatively junior member of the House, having not yet ascended to the political heights from which decades later, as Arizona’s senior senator, he …
Continue reading ‘Carl Hayden: “water as cheaply as it can be served”’ »
It was dark when I got out of my rental car yesterday evening in Rancho Bernardo, north of San Diego. I couldn’t really see the place, but I could smell the tell-tale scent of eucalyptus. I slept with the window open. There was a eucalyptus outside my window. I slept well. When I grew up …
Working on a book chapter about the genesis and importance of the Arizona v. California litigation over the Colorado River, I ran across this priceless little bit of business from 1944. It is Harry Bashore, Comissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, testifying in Phoenix in July of that year, before the a subcommittee of …
Continue reading ‘Drought and Despair: “these enemies of mankind”’ »
It rained kind of a lot in the intermountain west this month, which raises a fascinating question about the tools we use for Colorado River management, and the tendency of water managers and management institutions to base significant actions on median flow forecasts rather than managing with a flexibility that considers the probabilistic nature of …
Continue reading ‘Reduced releases from Lake Powell: no going back’ »
I loved this boldly written line in Bettina Boxall’s Los Angeles Times story last Sunday on the question of who will pay, and how much, for a proposed multi-billion dollar pair of water supply tunnels beneath the Sacramento Delta: Much of California agriculture is accustomed to vast amounts of cheap, federally subsidized water in the …
Continue reading ‘Federally subsidized California farm water’ »
The new header picture on the blog is from the USGS photo archive, attributed to E.C. LaRue, 1921, in Glen Canyon
Trying some stuff that I don’t want to do on my employer’s production server. Nothing to see here. Move along. Img 924111903 0001 (PDF) Img 924111903 0001 (Text)
There’s a newsroom joke that “we don’t write about planes that don’t crash,” but I think it’s important to think carefully about societal systems that succeed, because lessons learned matter: The flood pulse was impressive. But it is instructive to look at how much larger it would have been if not for a pair of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the flood that wasn’t’ »