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?’ »
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’ »