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.
Eilene Zimmerman on efforts in Southern California to do that which seems both obvious but somehow icky: treat our sewage and then reuse it: We don’t have enough water where we need it; if we don’t learn to deal with drinking toilet water, we’re going to be mighty thirsty.
It’s sort of an infrastructure triple junction. Below, you’ve got a big open concrete channel that substitutes for what used to be arroyos carrying water off of what is now a city. Adjacent to it, you’ve got a buried water main, carrying drinking water to the residents of that city. Above it, you have one …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert: Main Break Edition’ »
On the current status of our snowpack: Much of New Mexico is just like the forecasters said we should expect it to be: dry. With La Niña’s cool Pacific waters pushing storms away from us this year, Albuquerque and most points to the south and east have been drier than average since Oct. 1. The …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Forecast Edition’ »
Peter Waldman has a story in Portfolio exploring the role of the federal government in general and Harry Reid in particular in the growth of Las Vegas: In a city running out of water, massive housing projects rise in clouds of dust on the outer reaches of the Las Vegas Valley like stucco ramparts built …
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Years ago, when I had two working knees, I used to enjoy running in local 5k and 10k races. I would often linger at the finish area, hoping against hope that I might win one of those coveted top three age group finish medals. It rarely happened, but if the field was small enough, I …
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