From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month Colorado River operations plan (pdf): The April 24-Month Study with an annual release volume from Glen Canyon Dam of 8.23 maf projects a Lake Powell end of water year elevation of 3,662.63 feet. Based on this projected condition and consistent with the provision in Section 6.B.3 of the …
Sometimes a comparison can be useful.
Watching them bring water to the 300-year-old Duranes irrigation ditch.
Chris Brooks has a post on proposed legislation in Arizona that would have created incentives for large-scale rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge. The idea was to give people water rights to the resulting water stored in the aquifer. As Chris notes, there are a couple of problems. First, some of the rainwater you harvest and …
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …
Also from this morning’s paper, a story documenting Albuquerque’s 60th consecutive day without measurable precipitation. We’ve got an outside chance of breaking the streak this evening, and then again mid-week. But the forecasts are basically bleak. But the real import was tucked in near the end of the story (sub/ad req): Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau …
Continue reading ‘Something Else I Wrote Elsewhere: Supplementing the River’ »
From the Sunday Journal, a look at two proposals to pump and pipe water from rural New Mexico to the state’s rapidly developing Rio Grande corridor (sub/ad req): Ray Pittman pulled his 1994 F-150 pickup to the top of a thinly wooded hill, a short walk from the water tank he built back in 1999 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Moving Water, New Mexico Style’ »
From today’s Deseret News, a sigh of relief for this year’s beneficent snowpack, which has has eliminated (for now) the possibility of a shortage declaration on the lower Colorado River: If Lake Mead drops a little further, it would force a declaration of a shortage and a potential cascade of orders to cut water use. …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: About that “Law of the River” thing…’ »
Our friend Alison, who is a shopper of profound skill, scored this Shasta Dam tourist plate on a recent expedition. Built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation between 1938 and 1945, Shasta is part of the first post-Hoover Dam generation, a concrete arch structure capable of storing more than 4.5 million acre feet of water. …