From this morning’s Journal, the struggle to help a river get to its destination when it doesn’t really want to go there on its own (sub/ad req): RATTLESNAKE POINT — Without Jason Thibodaux’s help, the Rio Grande would have a hard time making it past this sediment-choked desert flood plain. Around a bend in the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The View from Rattlesnake Point’ »
Corporations are doing a poor job of incorporating water variability risk into the disclosures they make to stockholders, according to an analysis released this week by Ceres, an organization of environmental groups and investor advocates: Global water scarcity is one emerging risk that all companies should be focused on – and one about which investors …
Perhaps this explains Pat Mulroy’s recent travails: A court in drought-plagued Malawi has jailed a man accused of casting a spell that blocked rain from falling on his neighbour’s field, police say. The court sentenced Chikumbeni Mwanatheu, 35, to two months in prison with hard labour after he admitted a charge of witchcraft, police spokesman …
Continue reading ‘Here All Along I Thought It Was Climate Change….’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation has tuned up its estimates of the chances of release of extra water to help Lake Mead, now putting them at one in four this year, according to an update published today (Wed. 2/10). The jargon here is “equalization,” which happens when there is enough extra water upstream in Lake Powell …
Continue reading ‘Chances of Extra Water for Mead Remain Low’ »
Following a trail of bread crumbs from James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool led me to the tale of Tom Udall’s trip down Glen Canyon with his dad as a boy (sub/ad req). Udall, now a U.S. Senator from New Mexico, is the son of former Arizona congressman and Kennedy-Johnson Interior Secretary Stewart Udall: Glen Canyon …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Udalls and Glen Canyon Dam’ »
George Knapp on the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that supplies Las Vegas (Nev.) with water: Cockroaches have nothing on the water authority. Both would survive nuclear winter. A giant asteroid could wipe out half the globe, and the authority would march into the crater to file for water rights.
It’s no Yolo Bypass, but the Albuquerque Metropolitan Flood Control Authority pond up by my work is testament to the fact that if you add water to an arid ecosystem, stuff happens. Located at the end of the concrete-lined North Pino Arroyo, the pond is a holding basin, design to trap sediments and contaminants before …
The median forecast for flows on the upper Colorado River, out this morning, is 5.8 million acre feet, 73 percent of normal. That is down 400,000 acre feet from a month ago, and represents a continued reduction in the probability that there will be extra water upstream to pass down to replenish Lake Mead. Flows …
Working on a piece last year about the Colorado River Delta, a couple of people mentioned the remarkable thing that happened when surplus water spilled Lake Mead in (I think, going from memory here) the El Nino year of 1983 and for a brief shining time the Colorado made it all the way to the …
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?’ »