On Albuquerque’s appearance in the “our pipes are getting old!” discussion: Albuquerque’s water and sewer utility, facing hundreds of millions of dollars in costs over the next decade to replace aging pipes and treatment plants, is considering a series of rate increases in the next five years. When the last of the proposed rate hikes …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: ABQ water infrastructure’ »
When I posted a couple of weeks back on the fact that land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is subsiding faster than sea level is rising, a smart reader asked privately, “Yeah, so what’s the point?” My reader’s observation was, in essence, that it doesn’t really matter much in terms of policy response whether the …
With Texas emerging from its record drought, it’s a good time to size up how the state’s water systems have responded. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality reports that just two small community water systems, Spicewood Beach and Florence – a total population of less than 3,000 people – are in danger of running out …
Suggested storylines welcome.
Barry Nelson had an insightful post today comparing and contrasting the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta systems. There are important similarities – crashing (or crashed) ecosystems and water supplies for human systems that are stretched beyond the point of sustainability. But the institutional frameworks for addressing those problems and the prospect of …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta and the Colorado River – a comparison’ »
The June forecast on the Colorado River is almost an academic exercise at this point. What we’ve got is what we’ve got. But it’s nevertheless notable that the folks at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center only needed one color this month for their map:
The risk from sea level rise to California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta system is frequently discussed. As sea level rises, the argument goes, the risk of failing levees increases. With a substantial share of California’s farmland and population depending on water supplies that flow through the delta, failed levees is an enormous risk. Levee failures, as …
Continue reading ‘Sacramento Delta sinking faster than sea level is rising’ »
What’s the Colorado River failure mode? By which I mean, with as much specificity as we can muster, when the water begins to run short, who will get less? I’m pushing this question because of a frustration with the doom scenarios generated by simply extrapolating the diverging supply and demand curves forward in time and invoking …
Continue reading ‘In Arizona, a Colorado River shortfall would hit ag first’ »
I know it is in the mission statement of all card-carrying western water journalists to harp on the gloomy prospects of shortage. But in the near term, the odds of a surplus on the Colorado River are greater than the chances of a shortage, according to new calculations by the US Bureau of Reclamation. Don’t …
Continue reading ‘On the Colorado, chance of surplus early, shortage down the road’ »
The central premise of my book project is that, despite the enormous western water problems I regularly chronicle here and in the various other places I publish, I expect that we’ll do OK in the long run. My optimism comes from the way communities, when they approach the edge of the water supply cliff, show …