The Sacramento Delta is a classic example of government’s ability to kick the can down the road. Mike Taugher has a nice overview today of the current state of play: At least a couple of recent studies suggest California has, in recent years, bumped up against the upper limit of what it can take from …
Here in New Mexico, groundwater is regulated – sort of. If you’re a big municipality that pumps a lot, for example, you can be required to buy up surface water rights to replace the water that inevitably seeps from the rivers down to replace that which you have pumped. It’s not really regulating groundwater directly, …
Continue reading ‘Groundwater Regulation in California (or lack thereof)’ »
With all of the water in the western United States spoken for, there’s an increasingly common problem in water policy and politics discussions in which a seemingly simple solution to a water problem in fact just creates a different problem somewhere else. An article in the March/April Southwest Hydrology from my old stomping grounds of …
Continue reading ‘Rearranging the deck chairs on the western water Titanic’ »
Henry Brean has a story in this morning’s Las Vegas Review-Journal on the mess at the upper end of Lake Mead where the Colorado River used to empty out into a lake, dumping its sediment. Now that the lake level’s dropped, the river’s cutting back down through all that deposited glop, creating a new rapids: …
So remember all that stuff about the Colorado River not having enough water to meet needs? Turns out the Rio Grande is in a similar heap of hurt (ad walled): There are a lot of ways to slice and dice water data. But the message on Gretel Follingstad’s PowerPoint slide was simple. On the right …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Rio Grande Shortfall Edition’ »
Slippin’ in some John Wesley Powell over at the work blog when the boss isn’t lookin’.
Some of my favorite water people like to point out that we don’t have a problem of water shortage here in the arid West, but rather a problem of water allocation. In the comments, the mysterious DG seems to be in that camp, offering this on what will happen when the Colorado comes up short: …
Continue reading ‘How Much Water Does the Colorado Really Have, Part II’ »
Pat Mulroy, head of the water authority that serves Las Vegas, Nev., lays out the problem: Today the Colorado River represents 90 percent of our water supply. Due to the severe drought, we are within three years of losing our upper intake in Lake Mead, which represents 40 percent of our water supply; if the …
I’m still new to the strange and wonderful ways of lower Colorado River management, so I was struck by the hilarity of this situation, as explained by Chris Brooks. Farmers order water, which takes several days’ river time to reach them. But then it rains, so they don’t need the water, so it flows down …
80 percent of NM now in abnormally dry condition.