One of the guys at the Las Vegas Marina yesterday was sounding optimistic. Sure, the lake level’s low, he said, but they expect it to start rising soon. Plus, he said he heard they expect it to eventually come up another 60 feet. He shrugged as if to say, “Dunno, but that’s what I heard,” …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Another Place There Used To Be A Lake’ »
Down a long, dank corridor inside Hoover Dam that seems to be known as the “1211 tunnel” (things in the dam tend to be named after their elevation above sea level) and up a flight of stairs sits the top of the dam’s “stilling well”. It’s essentially a long tube that runs to the bottom …
If you blow this picture up enough, you can probably see pixels of rock that have not been exposed since the 1930s. Or maybe not. The surface elevation of Lake Mead hit 1083.18 feet above sea level today between 11 a.m. and noon Pacific time today, when this picture was taken. That is below the …
KINGMAN, ARIZ. – I made a beeline across two states today, heading for Lake Mead to watch history happen. It looks as though sometime tomorrow (Sun. 10/17) or Monday, depending on the weather and releases from Hoover Dam for power generation and downstream water users, the surface level of Lake Mead will drop below 1083.19 …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, Kingman, Ariz., edition’ »
I’m about to head off for a few days to watch Lake Mead drop, and for some reason thoughts turned this evening to G.K. Gilbert. Tomorrow is “blog action day“, and the subject is “water”, a topic about which I’ve had a few things to say of late. I’m frankly not all that excited about …
A friend just pointed me (thanks E!) to a provocative column by Bill deBuys last month published via High Country News last month on the loss of societal resiliency that accompanies water conservation efforts. DeBuys (author/editor of two of my favorite western water books – Salt Dreams and Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley …
Continue reading ‘Bill deBuys and the dilemma of water conservation’ »
Major water project development in the western US has always depended on federal subsidies. One can view those subsidies in a number of different ways – a boondoggle propping up rich ag interests, a foolish lack of clarity about what it really means to build a society in the arid lands, or a reasonable federal …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Will Utah Project be Scuttled?’ »
I’ve written before about the possibility that we could view Australia’s struggles with long term drought, especially in the Murray-Darling Basin, as a model for how to deal with things here in the arid southwest. This version of the model is perhaps not quite so hopeful. From Australian Broadcasting: A guide for water allocations in …
I’m guessing folks at “Californians for Population Stabilization” didn’t start with a worry about water supplies and then decide, “Wow, limiting immigration would be a great way of dealing with this problem!” Over the last thirty years, population has grown by one million in San Diego and population levels are projected to grow by another …