A year ago, I puzzled over the implications of the collapse of the southwest housing business for our long term water future. We’ve got another year of data, and no real sign that the southwestern growth engine in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the two cities closest to the edge of the water cliff, are coming …
Continue reading ‘Housing and water: a year later, are we closer to an answer?’ »
Let me suggest a positive narrative to the story of Texas’ great drought of 2011. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality today released its latest list of communities whose water supplies are threatened as a result of the driest year on record. Topping the list is tiny Groesbeck, between Dallas and Houston, where a line …
There’s a tradition in newspaper journalism of the heartwarming front page story on Christmas morn. Here’s mine: If you could look straight down 538 feet beneath the La Cueva High School neighborhood in Albuquerque’s far Northeast Heights, you would see water returning to the metro area’s depleted aquifer. The water table in the area had …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: a water wonk’s Christmas greeting’ »
Elizabeth Varin had an interesting story this morning about the latest Imperial Irrigation District discussions about the Quantification Settlement Agreement*, the Byzantine** water deal that provided a path for California to go on a Colorado River diet (reducing its use to its legally allotted 4.4 million acre feet per year). The deal has two key …
It’s not clear to me whether the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study is a tool for developing solutions to the long term supply-demand imbalance on the river, or a process for the states and other interests to stake out their turf. Probably some of both. Witness, for example, …
In Colossus, Michael Hiltzik talks about the way Hoover Dam, during its construction, became a tourist spectacle. When Lissa and I were in Boulder City last week, I found this in the museum-y hallway at the Boulder Dam Brewing Company (which has a lovely collection of similar memorabilia), a poster hawking tours: THE MAKING OF …
Not being up in Colorado, I don’t have a good feel for how seriously to take Aaron Million’s Flaming Gorge pipeline proposal. My hallway conversations at CRWUA left me with the feeling that not a lot of people in the basin take it very seriously, but I don’t know water issues in the state of …
Some more odds and ends from last week’s Colorado River Water Users Association meeting Yuma Desalting Plant The trial run of the Yuma Desalting Plant “went well,” according to Terry Fulp, head of the USBR Lower Colorado office. YPD was built in the early 1990s to clean up icky agricultural drain water to meet US …
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For better or worse, my decision to not pay the $15 a day for an internet connection at Caeser’s Palace has left me with a bow wave of things to write about after a week spent in an around the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, NV. Let’s start with Lake …
Continue reading ‘A drought of the Lower Colorado River Basin’s own making’ »
Thrown on driveways ’round town last week: The New Mexico Court of Appeals has turned into the state’s chief water policy nag. Three times in a little more than a year, most recently last week, the court issued rulings tinged with exasperation at the need to apply 20th century New Mexico water law to 21st …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico water law needs to catch up with reality’ »