We’ve seen a lot of news media attention in New Mexico’s drought of 2013 to the little village of Magdalena, where the wells earlier this month went dry. Small towns are especially vulnerable in drought. But as I dug into the data the last few weeks, I realized that journalistically swooping down on the town …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in small-town drought, why the wells go dry’ »
One of my gazillion water book ideas was “The Last Concrete”. It was going to be about the end of big water infrastructure in the West. Except there’s no way to know when the last one happens, because there are a bunch of lingering projects that probably won’t ever get built, but that don’t ever …
With “Chasing Water” and “Moving Water” taken, the current working title for my Colorado River book-in-progress is “The Great Mistake.” It doesn’t have enough action verbiness for the final cut, but it seems to nicely frame one of my central themes – that the folks who built the elaborate plumbing system in the Colorado River …
Wayne Bossert, who manages the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District No. 4, has a post up this morning about an idea being kicked around by his colleagues to the south to build an aqueduct to move Missouri River water westward to replenish supplies in depleted Ogallala-dependent communities: The proposal is to transfer high flows west …
Big package in the Sunday newspaper and on line triggered by a visit to the Jemez Mountains by Journal multimedia guy Pat Vasquez-Cunningham and myself to spend time with Tom Swetnam: The son of the National Forest Service’s Jemez district ranger, Swetnam grew up with a hand-cranked phone in the front bedroom, hardwired to the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I helped create elsewhere: “Is fire good? Is fire bad”?’ »
From a June 13 appearance on KNPR in Las Vegas, NV, with Pat Mulroy and Robert Glennon: States have resorted to lawsuits, and even military action to protect water sources in the past. Lawsuits have a huge downside, and can cost municipalities access to water if they lose. “What we’ve seen going back to the …
Continue reading ‘In Colorado River water, sharing the shortages versus suing the bastards’ »
One of the undertold stories, amid the gloomy forecasters for water in the southwestern United States, is the water conservation successes of the region’s major metro areas. Emily Green has a nice example from Los Angeles, where total water usage is down nearly 20 percent from 2006-07. Michael Cohen, at the Pacific Institute, documented this …
One of my favorite water books, Steven Solomon’s Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, persuasively demonstrates that one can trace the geography of human history through our relationship with water – our great port cities and rivers as highways, our first great industrial power supply, the source of fertile soil and the …
Continue reading ‘“City Water, City Life” – a positive review’ »
Jay Famiglietti, from UC Irvine in California, and his colleagues have made something of a scientific cottage industry out of the use of data from the German-NASA GRACE satellites (short for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) to measure changes in groundwater around the world. Not surprisingly, it’s going down as humans pump it out to use faster …
Continue reading ‘Famiglietti on GRACE and the need for good groundwater data’ »
Lake Powell, the large Upper Colorado River Basin Reservoir sitting behind Glen Canyon Dam, ended May with a surface elevation of 3,599.44 feet above sea level, 3 feet higher than projected a month ago, thanks to greater-than-anticipated runoff during the month. Some of that’s just time-shifting – an early melt bringing water down sooner than …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: June numbers show slight improvement in Lake Powell’ »