My name’s John, and I’m a water law junkie. I can’t get enough of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact. I love picking fights over the Upper Basin’s share of Mexico’s 1.5 million acre feet delivery obligation. I don’t care. I’ll argue either side. Just give me my fix. So I’ll happily stipulate that …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall on the Colorado River and “the reality of the public”’ »
Chatting on the sidelines of last week’s Clyde Martz Summer Water Conference in Boulder, Doug Kenney had a great suggestion. We need something along the lines of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous nuclear doomsday clock for Colorado River water management. Doug’s comment came when I was grabbing some quotes for my newspaper story on the Bureau of …
Two hundredths of an inch of rain this evening was enough to put the first water in our new rain barrels!
To be clear: I think the Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement today that it is curtailing releases from Lake Powell in 2014 is a big deal. But one of the members of my brain trust (journalism is a mashup – I just repackage the ideas of people much smarter than myself) points out that there’s an …
Continue reading ‘The case for the Lake Powell announcement being no big deal’ »
Via the Albuquerque Journal: BOULDER – With the Colorado River Basin gripped by extreme drought, federal water managers Friday announced historic water conservation measures. Supplies in New Mexico, one of seven states that depend on the river’s water, will be untouched by the moves. But experts said the move is a warning that demand is …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Shortage on the Colorado’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation is going to tell us Friday that there’s not very much water in Lake Powell, and that as a result releases from Powell will be curtailed in the coming year, which sets off a cascading set of effects downstream. I took a crack at explaining this here, but Brett Walton has …
From the Telegraph: Water companies across a third of the country will be required to consider fitting all properties in their areas with a water meter and billing customers for every drop they use. Under the order, approved this week by Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, some family water bills could double. It follows warnings …
Continue reading ‘Latest conservation technology, the “water meter”, sweeps British Isles’ »
From Juliet McKenna, another example of the lengths to which southwestern municipalities will go to adapt to shrinking water supply: LA’s plan calls for building one of the country’s largest groundwater treatment systems at one of its largest Superfund sites. Groundwater in the San Fernando basin has elevated levels of chromium, perchlorate, nitrates, and trichloroethylene …
Continue reading ‘Before we abandon LA because of water shortages, we’ll do this’ »
I’ll be on the radio Saturday at 9 a.m. with Katie Stone on KUNM’s Children’s Hour (one of the great Albuquerque media institutions) explaining Albuquerque’s aquifer. Streaming live on line or on your mobile device.
From Jay Lund, a comment on my post last week about low flows into that is worth elevating: Perhaps a bigger issue is that average unimpaired flow appears to be < 11 maf, but total allocations are more than 16 maf/year (1.5 maf/yr for Mexico and 7.5 maf each for the upper-basin and lower-basin states). …
Continue reading ‘Colorado Basin – the demand side problem’ »