River Beat: Hoover Dam Back in the Day
From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s photo archive, Hoover Dam seen from the upstream side, circa 1935:
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Water Conservation in a Wet Place
From the work blog, water conservation in a wet place: The rooftop rainwater catchment system and other features built into Kay Helt’s home and surrounding neighborhood in Stenløse, in the Danish farm country outside Copenhagen, captures some 70 percent of the annual rain that falls from the sky. It seems like a wet place – …
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Poppies
These things are blooming like nutso in the countryside around Copenhagen. They average around 24 inches of rain a year here, so it’s not a super wet place, but wet enough that there’s stuff growing everywhere. But not so wet that they don’t have problems with overdrafting their aquifers. Sound familiar? (More when I’m not …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dry Times Ahead in the West
From this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a story about the new paper in today’s Science by Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall about climate change in the West. Udall and Overpeck have become fixtures on the western water meeting circuit over the last several years delivering this message, and the paper contains no real surprises. But …
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River Beat: Chances of Mead Hitting 1075
I’ve written in the past about the remarkable fact that, despite the 10 driest years on record on the Colorado River, no one’s had their allocation reduced or cut off. The first plausible scenario under which that would change happens when the surface of Lake Mead drops to 1,075 feet above sea level. Under the …
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Meanwhile, on the Rio Grande…
The book project means I often pay more attention to the Colorado River, at least journalistically, than the river through my own back yard. But via the work blog, you can see that it’s dry over on this side of the continental divide as well: Over the last 14 years there have only been three …
River Beat: The Conversation About Limits
The suddenly ubiquitous Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River supply-demand graph showed up today in a helpful Bruce Finley story in today’s Denver Post about the conversation in Colorado regarding the disconnect between shrinking Colorado River supply and growing Colorado River demand: Colorado River water consumed yearly for agriculture and by the 30 million Westerners who …
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River Beat: Up to Driest 11 years on the Colorado
This observation from the first draft of next year’s U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River Annual Operating Plan should come as no surprise: Inflow to Lake Powell has been below average in nine of the past eleven years (2000-2010). Although slightly above average inflows occurred in 2005 and 2008, drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin persist. …
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Moving Water, Georgia Style
update: After looking again at the news story that triggered this, I’m now not so sure when the Georgia debate happened – maybe years ago? So maybe, other than thematically, this post makes little news sense. original: Here in the West, moving large quantities of uphill or sometimes out of its basin of origin completely …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Intel-NM Water Deal
From the pages of the Albuquerque Journal (sub/ad req), a look at the growing concerns regarding a deal between the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and Intel over water rights needed to cover Intel’s pumping: A proposed agreement to use excess Rio Grande water to meet computer chip-maker Intel’s long-term water rights needs faces growing …
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