Colorado River Pulse Flow On the Move Again

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Minute 319 Pulse Flow Map, 5/1/14

Minute 319 Pulse Flow Map, 5/1/14

After stalling out for a couple of weeks, the Colorado River Delta Minute 319 pulse flow is back on the move.

According to the latest map and missive from the science team, an earthen dam below the downstream-most habitat restoration site was removed, and the pulse has received an added stimulus from the Kilometer 27 Spillway (see nice NASA map/satellite image for the location). The KM27 release is an aspect of the critical “plumbing” aspect of this environmental restoration experiment. The main river channel, because of dry stretches with low groundwater, is not necessarily the most efficient way to get water to environmental restoration sites in the lower reaches of the delta, so some of the pulse flow water is making part of its journey through CONAGUA irrigation canals.

Irrigation and hope for New Mexico’s future

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New Mexico's appeal for statehood - greeting President Roosevelt at Albuquerque, Underwood & Underwood, c1903 June 11.

New Mexico’s appeal for statehood – greeting President Roosevelt at Albuquerque, Underwood & Underwood, c1903 June 11. Courtesy Library of Congress

Teddy Roosevelt, speaking in Santa Fe, NM, May 5, 1903, during his grand western tour:

I build no small hope upon the aid that under the wise law of Congress will ultimately be extended to this as to other States and Territories in the way of governmental aid to irrigation. Irrigation is of course to be in the future well-nigh the most potent factor in the agricultural development of this Territory and one of the factors which will do most toward bringing it up to Statehood. Nothing will count more than development of that kind in bringing the Territory in as a State. That is the kind of development which I am most anxious to see here the development that means permanent growth in the capacity of the land, not temporary, not the exploiting of the land for a year or two at the cost of its future impoverishment, but the building up of farm and ranch in such shape as to benefit the home-maker whose intention it is that this Territory of the present, this State of the future, shall be a great State in the American Union.

(I’m a little confused by the dates, but the picture appears to be from that same tour, possibly taken on the same day as his Santa Fe speech.)

more stuff I wrote elsewhere: NM Env. Dept. dings Air Force over groundwater cleanup (or lack thereof)

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Also from this morning’s paper, a tougher stance from the New Mexico Environment Department on progress (or lack thereof) in cleaning up a massive groundwater mess beneath Kirtland Air Force Base and adjacent Albuquerque neighborhoods:

The letter provided to the Journal is an expression of increasing Environment Department frustration with the cleanup progress. A month ago, in response to Journal questions about progress in meeting cleanup milestones, Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn issued a statement saying, “While we are by no means satisfied with the amount of time it has taken to make meaningful progress on this situation, we are encouraged by the Air Force’s efforts over the past 6 months.”

The April 24 letter takes a sterner tone, complaining about “an overall lack of attention to detail for a matter that is of the utmost importance to NMED and the State of New Mexico.”

Poor-quality work by the Air Force and its contractor, CB&I, “has jeopardized the achievement of the interim measures by the specified deadlines,” state Environmental Health Division Director Tom Blaine wrote.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Embudo and the history of measuring water

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From this morning’s paper, a visit to Embudo, where stream U.S. stream flow measurement began:

In the world of U.S. water management, this narrow strip where the river funnels between high bluffs is historic.

Powell, most famous as the first person to survey the Grand Canyon, had realized that the ambitions of the continent’s European immigrants spreading west across North America were running up against an arid reality that Easterners failed to understand. Collective effort would be needed to confront the region’s aridity,

Powell realized, and one of the first things the young nation needed was to measure how much water there was in the rivers.

How the media gets drought coverage wrong

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The perception of many residents that the drought gravely threatened their pocketbook and way of life was more often than not an exaggeration. Such irrational reactions were in part driven by the media’s coverage of the drought. Water, usually taken for granted and ignored, became their lead story as the drought continued. Video from helicopters circling near dry reservoirs and of antagonistic confrontations in surprisingly full water District board rooms made good copy as news reports. Yet most media sources were largely unable or unwilling to convey the more complex and prosaic aspects of water management. In particular, the gulf between traditional water policies and practices and a changing context of supply and demand had widened over many years, and therefore could not be captured on camera. Thus, media sources often responded to public interest in the drought, not by providing adequate background knowledge, but by exaggerating or distorting the actual nature of the scarcity problem.

Tom Waller, describing the 1980s California drought, in “Expertise, Elites, and Resource Management Reform”, Journal of Political Ecology, 1994

Beavers in the Colorado River Delta

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Godfrey Sykes, Map of the Colorado River Delta, 1905

Godfrey Sykes, Map of the Colorado River Delta, 1905

When Daniel Trembley MacDougal of the New York Botanical Garden rode a flood pulse through the Colorado River Delta in 1905, he found a puzzling landscape – one of the most arid regions of North America sliced through by “swampy jungles”. At a time when beaver was being trapped into oblivion elsewhere, it was a landscape that seemed to MacDougal to offer hope:

The area actually irrigated by the river in normal low water and flood … is surrounded on all sides by desert and salt water, and is in reality a biological island….

The quantity of food furnished by the swampy jungles is sufficient to support a vast amount of native animal life, and furnishes inviting feeding grounds for migrating birds. The countless millions of young willow and poplar shoots supply food for the beaver, which bids well to hold out long in the impassable bayous and swamps against the trapper foe.

Of course it wasn’t trapper foes who reduced the delta’s beaver population but dams upstream that choked off the “swampy jungles” and “impassable bayous”. But a survey done in the 1990s by Eric Mellink and Jaime Luevano found remnant beaver populations did hold out, sometimes even when the only water available was standing, stagnant pools. As long as there were willows and cottonwoods (MacDougal called them “poplars”) Mellink and Luevano found beavers.

When I toured the Laguna CILA (pdf) habitat restoration site in the delta last month, before the Minute 319 environmental pulse flow arrived, we saw a little beaver dam:

beaver dam at Laguna CILA site, March 27, 2014, by John Fleck

beaver dam at Laguna CILA site, March 27, 2014, by John Fleck


(Thanks to Steve Nelson for pointing me to the MacDougal paper.)

the palm is a water loving plant

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Irrigating a palm oasis from an Imperial Irrigation District canal, by John Fleck, March 2014

Irrigating a palm oasis from an Imperial Irrigation District canal, by John Fleck, March 2014

One of the fundamental propositions of date culture is that the palm requires a large supply of water for irrigation. This rule is apparently subject to some striking exceptions and future experiments will probably change our ideas on the subject still more, though they can hardly shake the fact that the palm is a water loving plant.

Date Growing in the Old World and the New, Popenoe and Bennett, George Rice and Sons Press, 1913