The Rio Grande at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue bridge dropped to 200 cubic feet per second overnight, perfect timing for this morning’s newspaper piece about low flows on the river (sub/ad req). For those not versed in our obscure ways of water measurement, “200 cfs” translates roughly as “awful damn low”: Water agencies are scrambling to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Parched Rio Grande’ »
When the price of water rises, ag users feel the most pain. That seems to be what is happening in northern San Diego County, where rising prices of water delivered by the Metropolitan Water District to the Valley Center Municipal Water District is apparently making a big dent in the avocado business, reports Pat Maio: …
This being “World Rivers Day“, I spent the morning puzzling over the nature of ours. Truth is, I was planning on being aware of our river this morning anyway, via a ride on my new bicycle (seen here propped against a log at one of the constructed wetlands adjacent to the Rio Grande). I don’t …
“Water year” 2010 ends next week, making this a good time to take stock of our historic position on the Colorado River. And by a couple of different measures, things are truly historic: The latest forecast (and right now forecasting amounts to tiny fractions of in inch) puts Lake Mead’s surface elevation at 1084.14 feet …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: End of the Water Year, Taking Stock’ »
In a debate between candidates for Colorado Congressional District 3 (the western part of the state, including the west slope and Colorado river), the two candidates are reported to have shown clear agreement on an important point: Both pledged heartily to fight all efforts to reopen the Colorado River Compact. Also, all efforts to switch …
Continue reading ‘The Politics of the Colorado River Compact’ »
With La Niña rapidly strengthening, it is reasonable to ask what can be said about the resulting effect on flows in the Colorado River. The short answer: not much. It is reasonable to guess otherwise, because so much of the southwest depends on the Colorado for its water supply, and because La Niña is so …
Lissa found a treasure for me at Sam Weller’s in Salt Lake City – the March 1956 issue of Arizona Highways: Among the gems within is Ak Akvik’s Servant of the People (tribute to Hoover Dam). An excerpt: Below, stilled forever the red rage of the angry river. Below, in blue serenity, as docile as …
Speaking at a symposium in Las Vegas in April, former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Bob Johnson made a critical point about the differences between water problems on the Colorado River and the current struggles in the southeast over the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river basins. The ACT-ACF fights made the Economist this week, in an article …
I am the type of journalist who loves a juicy, seemingly intractable political/policy problem. That’s why I love writing about water. But as a New Mexico water writer, I confess to a certain amount of envy at my colleagues to the west. Sure, we’ve got some tough water problems in our state. But they are …
I love this picture of what I can only assume are three rascals defying their mothers and swimming in the New River, in the Imperial Valley of Southern California in 1905. The New River, in the incarnation seen here, was formed when the Colorado River ate through a poorly built intake structure and chewed up …