Bob Berwyn has a nice rundown on the process now underway at the Colorado Water Conservation Board to determine how much water is left in the Colorado River for the state of Colorado to develop. Here’s the nut of the issue: After conducting what they say is one of the most rigorous studies ever of …
Continue reading ‘How Much Water Does the State of Colorado Have?’ »
My obsession with Albuquerque’s plumbing continues with today’s column (sub/ad req), a look at what’s in the stormwater running off of Albuquerque and what the various agencies, primarily federal and local, are doing about it: After a good rain, the concrete channel that collects rainwater from much of Albuquerque has the dirty-brown look of a …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Stormwater Quality’ »
E.C. LaRue’s 1916 Colorado River and Its Utilization was a pioneering effort to quantify how much water was in the Colorado River and what we might do with it. I was happy to find that the USGS had digitized it, albeit in a somewhat funky format that required some minor hackery to extract and read.* …
Eric P asked a question on my moving water post that sent me back into the history books: I also wonder, out loud, whether the Mormons did some observing of their Hispanic neighbors to figure out the irrigation system in Utah, which was like the acequia system. Hmm… To refresh memory, the first waves of …
In addition to New Mexico’s nascent efforts at desalinating brackish groundwater to provide municipal and industrial supplies, there’s serious conversation right now in Arizona. I’ve had this story about recent sitting in my “think about this issue” pile for the last week. It’s an account of recent state legislative testimony from Karen Smith of the …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a story (sub/ad req.) about new research suggesting that, in the past, the jet stream moved north and what is now the southwestern U.S. dried out when the world was warmer: For 45,000 years, the drips built stalactites and stalagmites in Fort Stanton Cave. The minerals in the rocky deposits …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Drying of the Southwest’ »
Officials in Sandoval County, the suburban-rural region to the north of Albuquerque’s metro area, are moving ahead with plans to build a plant to desalinate brackish groundwater, my ABQJournal colleague Rosalie Rayburn reports (sub/ad req?): Sandoval County officials are forging ahead with plans for a desalination plant despite engineering, waste disposal and funding challenges. County …
Earlier this month, Henry Brean described Pat Mulroy’s bold proposal: The general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority said now may be the time to take a serious look at a decades-old idea of capturing floodwater from the Mississippi River and using it to recharge the massive groundwater aquifer beneath the Central Plains. In …
One of the problems with courts deciding important political or policy questions on procedural grounds is that the substantive issues remain unresolved. Instead, we get more process. Such, it seems, is the case with today’s decision by the Nevada Supreme Court to invalidate Las Vegas’s applications for rights to fill its urban pipeline with rural …
Reading slides from a presentation by Colorado River Water Conservation District general counsel Peter Fleming, I ran across a rule of thumb governing water politics there, the “80/20 rule”: 80 percent of the water is west of the continental divide, and 20 percent is east. For population, the numbers are reversed. This seems a useful …