“Lake Mead dangerously low on water”
Seems we’ve been at this for a while: update @jfleck it's tipping points all the way down — Brett Walton (@waltonwater) June 29, 2016
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
The argument for California to make a Colorado River deal
The trick now is for the three U.S. states sharing the Colorado River’s water downstream of of Lake Mead – Nevada, Arizona, and California – to negotiate some sort of a deal that reduces their collective take on the river. That’s trick one. Trick two is for state negotiators to then sell the deal back …
Continue reading ‘The argument for California to make a Colorado River deal’ »
1,072
Lake Mead this evening is passing through a historic milestone – below elevation 1,072 feet above sea level for the first time since it was filled in the 1930s.
The 1970s were a simpler time
Lake Powell at its highest level in four years
Despite a below-average year in the Upper Colorado River Basin, Lake Powell will reach its summer peak this year at its highest level in four years. That comes despite the fact that, once again, the Upper Basin is releasing “bonus” water from Glen Canyon Dam to prop up water users in Arizona, Nevada, California, and …
Continue reading ‘Lake Powell at its highest level in four years’ »
Gila River diversion being significantly downscaled
We now have an answer to the question of where the money will come from for a billion dollar diversion to take water from the Gila River, a Colorado River tributary in southwestern New Mexico. Nowhere. Laura Paskus has the scoop on this week’s decision by the project’s governing body to abandon the Cadillac versions …
Continue reading ‘Gila River diversion being significantly downscaled’ »
Palm Springs, a water conservation success?
Palm Springs, in the deserts of Southern California, would never be mistaken for an actual desert. They dump too much water on their landscaping for that. But Ian James reports they’re getting better: May turned out to be a banner month for water conservation in the Palm Springs area, with customers of the Desert Water …
Continue reading ‘Palm Springs, a water conservation success?’ »
Metro Los Angeles – one of the places Californians *do* regulate their groundwater
Steve Scauzillo wrote last week about the Water Replenishment District of Southern California’s decision to invest $110 million in a new wastewater treatment plant, that they might use 21,000 acre feet now discharged to the ocean to recharge regional aquifers instead. Formed in the early 1960s, the WRD is the best example of one of …
Allen Best on the lullaby of spring runoff
Living by a creek in Vail, an open window, the lullaby: I loved that sound, what Wallace Stegner, in one of his many books, called “The Sound of Mountain Water.” In those same years I often kept my window open at night, lulled to sleep with the sweet discourse of a billion water molecules sloshing, …
Continue reading ‘Allen Best on the lullaby of spring runoff’ »
Unsettled questions about Native American water rights in the Colorado River Basin
More than a dozen Native American communities in the Colorado River Basin have yet to have their legal entitlements to a share of the river’s water quantified, according to a new report from the Colorado River Research Group. With the river’s water already over-appropriated (meaning users, largely non-Indian, have built farms and cities that have …