Archive of posts filed under the water category.

Drought, outdoor landscaping, and the benefit of being a bit wasteful

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Water conservation poses a dilemma. Let’s say you’re an American city that’s running into a serious drought problem. I don’t know, say for example you’re Galveston, Texas: Authorities have banned outdoor watering in most Galveston County municipalities as Texas continues to grapple with its record drought. In a letter this week, the Texas Commission on …

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Why I’m optimistic about Colorado River water (California? not so much)

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When I was a young reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, I wrote a lot about the municipal budget, reasoning that budgets are where governments most explicitly establish and act on their priorities. But it was frustrating, because I just had one budget – no real points of comparison. So I set out one year to …

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The Colorado River and Sacramento Delta limits

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Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, the NRDC’s Doug Obegi makes the central point about the linkage between water problems across the west. Responding to Victor Davis Hanson’s argument in favor of giving farmers more water from the Sacramento Delta, Obegi makes the salient point that there isn’t the water to give: The …

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Declining Colorado

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Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …

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Who Was Carl Rasch? The lawyer behind the Winters Doctrine

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update: A previous version of this post had what I though was a picture of Carl Rasch. Upon inquiry, I think it was a black-and-white picture of some other old dude with a great mustache. In answer to a question that came up in conversation on Twitter today, herewith an abbreviated version of the story …

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You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers

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Yesterday’s post about recurring suggestion that we build giant water infrastructure was premised in part on this year’s extremely wet year on the Missouri-Mississippi system, the “Why not build a big pipe from there to the desert” argument. As I mention, I hear this idea a lot, but especially this year, when it seems like …

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Drought? But it’s flooding on the Mississippi!

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Nearly every time I write a newspaper story about water, and without fail every time I give a talk, I get a question about why we don’t just build a big canal from some wet place and bring the water here to the desert southwest. It just seems so crazy to me – so over-the-top-engineering-costly-we-don’t-do-that-stuff-any-more …

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