Henry Brean, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, caught something remarkable in the latest monthly reservoir operations plan published by the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River region office. By next month, Lake Mead will drop below 1,100 feet above sea level in surface elevation – the first time it has dropped below that …
I only know what I read in the paper these days about the Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s giant water wholesaler. But it sure looks from this LA Times story as though the Met is trying to use market mechanisms to impose a 10 percent reduction in deliveries: The Metropolitan Water District, which imports water …
Continue reading ‘Southern California Cutbacks: A Market Mechanism’ »
When I install a low-flow toilet, I use less water each time I flush. In the arid West, this is a good thing, right? Maybe. Maybe not. In Albuquerque, essentially every gallon I flush, after treatment at our sewage plant, ends up in the river, available for downstream users. It’s called “return flow credit”, and …
IMG_0252 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. That’s the Rio Grande you see there – the entire Rio Grande, as it leaves Cochiti Dam 40 river miles north of Albuquerque. It was flowing at about 1,000 cubic feet per second today when Lissa and I drove by during a Sunday wander. Cochiti, completed in the early 1970s, …
Aaron Million and his Wyoming-Colorado water pipeline idea have been around a while. They’re still here. I’m not inclined to pay a whole lot of credence to his idea of piping gobs of water from Wyoming to meet the demand in growing Front Range cities. But he’s still at it, having persuaded the feds to …
V.B. Price, in the Independent, has a must-read rumination on water constraints in middle Rio Grande planning: Is the notion of “reinventing cities” in the American West less about new rail and other transportation infrastructure than it is about finally being honest about water and doing something about it? But what could be done? Must …
On the political tension over water conservation: Why should I save water when all it does is enable more sprawl?
My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time …
Continue reading ‘On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events’ »
Daniel Hernandez, on Mexico City: Reserves of the city’s largely imported water supplies from the Cutzamala plant are at their lowest in years. Hoping to prevent a larger disaster, for three days a month, the municipal water utility has decided to run the city’s supply at 50% its normal flow. March 14 was the first …
Continue reading ‘Imagine One of the World’s Largest Cities, Without Running Water’ »
Everybody’s calling the big omnibus public lands bill that passed the House yesterday a wilderness bill, but we water wonks know better, right: Legislation to settle a long-standing dispute over the Navajo Nation’s rights to water from the San Juan River won final congressional approval Wednesday. The legislation acknowledges the Navajo Nation’s right to 600,000 …