From Thursday’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a look at what is increasingly looking to be a very dry year on the Rio Grande, which has become entangled in a Byzantine governance issue involving allocation and distribution of Lower Rio Grande water: In recent years, dry conditions have made managing the river more difficult. Eight out of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Year on the Rio Grande’ »
John McChesney, former NPR guy now at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, has jumped into the Law of the River discussion with a look at Doug Kenney’s work on rethinking the Law of the River: Kenney doesn’t believe the law of the river needs to be tossed out, but he says it …
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The US Bureau of Reclamation announced today that they’ve completed the pilot run of their Yuma Desalting Plant, cleaning up 30,000 acre feet of really crappy ag drain water. (“Crappy ag drain water” – my words, not theirs). From Joyce Lobeck in the Yuma Sun (and seldom was their a more appropriately named newspaper): Undertaken …
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When the science team working on the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) invited me to give a media-communication perspective at a meeting back in the summer of 2006, I titled my talk “Maybe We Shouldn’t Call It `Drought’”. The problem is that the word is used in so many different ways, meaning so many different …
I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt about the water issues that so obsess us here in the Southwestern United States. Most of us have running water in our homes. It’s remarkably free of contaminants and pathogens. The arguments we have are generally about how to distribute this bounty, not whether we have it at …
From the morning paper (sub/ad req): Groundwater contamination from a Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill has spread farther than previously believed, according to a report presented to municipal water officials Wednesday. A new test well drilled by the Air Force last year beneath a southeast Albuquerque neighborhood shows evidence of contamination, two blocks …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: latest on the jet fuel plume’ »
This week’s column, in which I play the national security card (sub/ad req): These are the same folks responsible for maintaining our nuclear deterrent. They are thinking this way because the language of risk and uncertainty is familiar to people in the national security community, and it is their job to think about and help …
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About that whole Colorado River shortage thing? Chill. From a Central Arizona Project statement sent ’round to reporters today: According to the Bureau of Reclamation, current conditions on the Colorado River indicate a 97 percent probability that more than 2.5 million acre-feet (more than 850 billion gallons) of additional river water will flow from Lake …
Via the work blog, a hilarious tidbit from this morning’s New Mexico Drought Monitoring Working Group meeting – a Special Weather Statement sent out Saturday by the El Paso office of the National Weather Service: For the last several weeks parts of the Rio Grande have gone completely dry…especially on El Paso’s west side. Many …
I sat in the audience dumbfounded last month listening to Pat Mulroy speak at the 16th Annual Water Conservation/Xeriscape Expo here in Albuquerque. Mulroy is the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that wholesales water to the Las Vegas, Nev., area, and is arguably the most prominent figure in western water politics and …
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