Archive of posts filed under the water category.

The Sacramento Delta and the Colorado River – a comparison

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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 …

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Sacramento Delta sinking faster than sea level is rising

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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 …

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In Arizona, a Colorado River shortfall would hit ag first

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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 …

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On the Colorado, chance of surplus early, shortage down the road

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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 …

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Hoover Dam from above

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I believe that anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money. – Marc Reisner When your vantage point spans a sufficient chunk of landscape, Hoover Dam doesn’t look so big. Is this really the right scale at which to think of it?

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Kirtland jet fuel spill

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I dashed out of town early Wednesday and failed to share with Inkstain readers the latest in the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel saga: As much as 24 million gallons of jet fuel might have escaped from a decades-long leak in an underground Kirtland Air Force Base pipe, three times more than previously estimated, …

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Time-of-day watering restrictions in Tucson

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From Douglas Kupel’s history of Arizona water, the story of Tucson’s efforts to conserve supply against rapidly rising demand. One thought – regulating outdoor watering: [T]he city council discussed a plan to limit all such irrigation to between six o’clock in the evening and four o’clock in the morning. The year was 1893.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: endangered species problem highlights deeper problems on the Rio Grande

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My column in the morning paper on a rift between the state of New Mexico and the feds over water for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. Because it’s not really about a fish: As has been happening for more than a decade on the Rio Grande, the minnow is merely one of the first …

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