I’ve been watching Lake Mead rise remarkably as a result of last week’s storm that blew through Nevada before drenching the Virgin River watershed on the Arizona-Nevada-Utah border area. It looks like Mead will finish December at a surface elevation of about 1086.25 feet above sea level, 2 feet above the level forecast a month …
I’m certain this graph is of enormous importance in understanding long range water issues in the west. But I’m not entirely sure how. It’s single family home starts in the Phoenix (blue) and Las Vegas (red) metro areas over the last decade: What you see here is the housing bubble bursting. Adam Nagourney did a …
Rebecca Hammer at the NRDC makes an interesting point regarding the relationship between last week’s census data dump and water supplies: [T]he greatest U.S. population growth is occurring precisely where water supplies are going to be the most vulnerable over the coming years. She’s talking about us in the arid western United States.
Shaun McKinnon reports this morning on a very interesting proposal under discussion in Arizona: Under a plan now being considered, water officials would pass up billions of gallons that they could take from the river in 2011, hoping to keep the drought-stricken reservoir full enough to avoid triggering automatic cutbacks. Any cutbacks could deny Arizona …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Conservation before shortage?’ »
Georgia averages 50 inches (127 cm) of rain a year. Arizona averages 13 (30 cm). Which is more likely to suffer water shortages? I’m fascinated by the non-trivial nature of the answer. The problems of both lakes Lanier and Mead have been well chronicled. At Lanier in 2007, we were within three months of Atlanta …
Continue reading ‘You don’t have to be dry to be water short’ »
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Mexican Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada signed an agreement today that, for the first time, allows long-term storage of Mexican Colorado River water in U.S. reservoirs. It’s an attempt to solve a short-term problem – the inability of Mexican users to take their full allotments …
If you’re a western water manager, the corners of your smile must be crinkled up in delight at the latest Quantitative Precipitation Forecast from the National Weather Service. That’s some mighty big bulls-eyes you see on the map over the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River Basin. Going into this, the snow pack in the …
Most of my water journalism involves the supply side, but this week I indulged my fascination with the back end of the problem – moving it away from the places we don’t want it (sub/ad req): The southwest valley is one of three large areas in the Albuquerque metro area where government agencies working on …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: My Fascination With Flood Control’ »
I must admit that when I first heard the idea of a tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California to carry water from the Sacramento River to users to the south, I thought it wacky, on purely engineering grounds. With no evidence or expertise, I thought the whole idea was just batshit crazy. But …
The roadblock to solving western water problems: [T]he understandable tendency of state, local, and federal interests to defer painful concessions in water resource allocation. Indecision persists as long as there is no absolute requirement that problems be solved. Paul L. Bloom, Law of the River: A Critique of an Extraordinary Legal System, in New Courses …
Continue reading ‘Western Water – the Persistent Roadblock’ »