Angostura Dam Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I stopped at Angostura Dam on a recent drive up to Santa Fe. It’s the diversion for water used in the Albuquerque reach of the middle Rio Grande. It’s a modest affair, built in the 1930s, just building up enough head to divert water into a concrete …
While I’m at it, another global drought report (I’m really just catching up on some news stories I set aside over the last week to read). This time Chile: Farmers in small towns in south-central Chile have lost crops and livestock in the drought blamed on the weather phenomenon La Nina. Rainfall records show the …
While we’ve been seeing news of extraordinary snows in China, folks in the north are in the grip of what sounds like serious drought: The drought has led to loss of arable land, livestock and drinking water, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, the official Xinhua News Agency said late Sunday. …
There’s a war of words going on out West that is by turns hilarious and illustrative of the deep divisions regarding the use of water in our arid region. The trigger was a comment by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman in response to Tim Barnett’s study suggestion Lake Mead had a 50-50 chance of going …
The water wonks have been all over the story about Tucson’s problems with low-flow toilets: not enough water to get the, umm, solids to the sewage treatment plant. I’ll go with Shaun McKinnon: Tucson’s sewer pipes may have a case of the feeble flushes, suffering from cramps brought on by too little water in the …
Pat Mulroy is one of the most interesting people in Western Water right now. As the General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, she’s the one responsible for getting Las Vegas the water it needs. Or, more precisely, the water it says it thinks it needs. Michael Campana had an interesting comment recently, though, …
Continue reading ‘Pat Mulroy and the Problem of Western Water’ »
I’ve been too busy this week to spend any time looking at the new monthly numbers myself, so I’ll let Aquafornia and Staci Matlock be your guides to reports that the snowpack in the mountains feeding the Rio Grande and the Colorado is looking mighty good right now. Or how ’bout this map. I haven’t …
We here in the West tend to think parochially about our water wars, as if we’re all six guns throwing down at the OK corral over whether the humble sheepherders or the evil cattle barons control the creek – as if no one knows water fights like us grizzled Westerners. But right now it looks …
The inimitable Coco weighs in on the problem of agriculture in the desert: Just how ill-suited desert communities are to agriculture in general depends entirely on the location of the desert community. The short view prevails. It says agriculture isn’t profitable on a small scale. We don’t have enough of it to matter anymore. And …
Fingerprinting global warming.