I often don’t know what to make of California, despite it being the state of my birth and a source of endless study and fascination. Jerry Brown was the governor when I was a teenager, and I respect him as one of the nation’s great politicians. I mean something specific and respectful by the term …
Via Realtor.com, we find this lovely 7,000-square foot home in Boulder City, Nev., with a swimming pool plus a great view of the bathtub ring on a dwindling Lake Mead, where the pool water came from: Yours for just $1.9m.
My current water policy obsession is the question of what actually happens – agency by agency, water user by user – when the water starts to run out. Much of the “OMG, we’re running out of water!” discussion plays out in the form of graphs of the future that extend projected supply and demand curves, …
I confronted a litany of drought when I was making the rounds on my newspaper beat this morning. No doubt this has happened before and I’ve just not noticed it, but the current forecasts are dry at all the basic time scales I watch closely. I lined ’em all up so you could share New …
Continue reading ‘Running the table: dry at all relevant time scales’ »
Based on the latest federal forecasts (pdf from USBR here), we can expect Lake Powell to drop 20 feet this year and Lake Mead to drop 10 feet. That’s the midpoint forecast. Could be better if it snows. Could be worse. So far the trend based on the first half of January leans toward worse. …
Continue reading ‘Draining the Colorado River’s reservoirs, 2013 edition’ »
There’s a rich, historical elegance to the tradition of state-v-state lawsuits over interstate compacts. Because each of the US states is constitutionally sovereign, when they sue one another over water flowing down a river from one state to the next, the legal action begins and ends before the US Supreme Court – the court of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: original jurisdiction’ »
The bonus water of 2010-11 on the Colorado River, when Lake Mead jumped nearly 50 feet in surface elevation, is looking more and more like an anomaly. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center issued its January forecast this week, with early snowpack pointing to a mid-point forecast of 61 percent of average flow into Lake …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Another Bad Year on the Colorado’ »
In the summer of 1869, while John Wesley Powell was making his first journey down the Colorado River, Ferdinand V. Hayden, he of the famous Hayden surveys, was making a less notable journey down the eastern flank of the Rockies, from Colorado into New Mexico. Hayden’s primary purpose was geology, with an eye toward the region’s …
I went for a walk this morning at the old Two-Mile Dam site on the Santa Fe River east of Santa Fe, NM. It’s two miles from downtown (hence the name), in the Sangre de Cristo foothills near the end of a road lined with wealth. Santa Fe is unusual in New Mexico as a …
Back in the 1980s, when I was a reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, Tim Brick sold me on the fact that water was a great story. Pasadena had a municipal water agency, so it made sense that the city hall beat reporter should pay attention. But Tim, Pasadena’s representative on the Metropolitan Water District board …