Another dry month at my house

Posted by on

I take my rainfall measurements at 7 a.m., so June’s over for me. I’m happy to report that our 0.14 inch (36 cm) of rain puts us over an inch for the Oct-now “water year”! We’re planning a fireworks celebration for later this evening, out by the dry brush in the far back corner of the yard.*

Our 1.14 inches (2.9 cm) for the first nine months of the water year are 24 percent of the long term mean. The last month with above average precipitation here was April 2012.

October-June precip, Heineman-Fleck house, Albuquerque NM

October-June precip, Heineman-Fleck house, Albuquerque NM

* This is a joke. There is evidence of a dramatic spike in the number of people burning stuff down around July 4.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in small-town drought, why the wells go dry

Posted by on

We’ve seen a lot of news media attention in New Mexico’s drought of 2013 to the little village of Magdalena, where the wells earlier this month went dry. Small towns are especially vulnerable in drought. But as I dug into the data the last few weeks, I realized that journalistically swooping down on the town that ran out may be missing something:

[L]ike Sherlock Holmes’ curious case of the dog that did not bark in the night, a key part of the story of the drought of 2013 in rural New Mexico may be the communities that have not been in the news, because they have not run out of water.

While solid numbers are hard to come by, some in the state’s water management community say they believe there are fewer small community water problems in 2013 than in the last major drought, of 2002-03. With the severity of the current drought, water tables all across New Mexico are dropping. But many communities threatened by drought last time around have upgraded their systems, making them more resilient.

After a similar drought ten years ago, the state did an analysis of the towns that went dry:

The 2005 report found that such infrastructure neglect was a common denominator in the communities that lost their water during the 2002-03 drought. “Almost all of these ‘emergencies’ were in fact due to a chronic lack of adequate management, maintenance, and system planning,” the report concluded. The communities where water systems failed “were not robust enough to handle the stress of drought conditions,” the report found.

Raising Shasta Dam

Posted by on

One of my gazillion water book ideas was “The Last Concrete”. It was going to be about the end of big water infrastructure in the West. Except there’s no way to know when the last one happens, because there are a bunch of lingering projects that probably won’t ever get built, but that don’t ever quite get killed.

I’ve assumed the proposal to raise Shasta Dam in California is one of those. Or not:

In February of 2012, the Bureau of Reclamation released a Draft Feasibility Study that determined the project was both technically and environmentally feasible, as well as economically justified; the study determined that raising the dam 18.5 feet would cost just over $1 billion dollars and would produce from $18 to $63 million in net economic benefits per year.

More from Maven on the release of the project National Environmental Policy Act draft studies.

 

Marble Canyon: burrowing into the Earth

Posted by on
Marble Canyon, 1923

Marble Canyon, 1923, USGS

From the 1923 US Geological Survey’s Birdseye Expedition of the Grand Canyon. The full caption:

Sheer walls in Marble Canyon. The rate at which this canyon burrows its way into the earth never fails to astonish the traveler entering it for the first time. Twenty miles below its head, the walls are 2,000 feet above the river, nine-tenths being due to the rise of the plateau and one-tenth to the descent of the stream. Colorado River Survey of 1923 (Birdseye).

Picture courtesy of the USGS digital photo archive of the Birdseye Expedition. More on the expedition in Damming Grand Canyon: The 1923 USGS Colorado River Expedition by Diane Boyer and Robert Webb.

 

 

The Great Mistake, 1928 edition

Posted by on
William L. Sibert

William L. Sibert, who warned us that there was less water in the Colorado River than we thought

With “Chasing Water” and “Moving Water” taken, the current working title for my Colorado River book-in-progress is “The Great Mistake.” It doesn’t have enough action verbiness for the final cut, but it seems to nicely frame one of my central themes – that the folks who built the elaborate plumbing system in the Colorado River Basin were mistaken about how much water they had to work with.

The problem: the 1922 Colorado River Compact allocated a fixed amount – 7.5 million acre feet for the four states in the Upper Basin, 7.5 million acre feet for the three states in the lower basin, with a vague wave of the hand to the idea that Mexico also ought to get some water. With the Mexican share later quantified at 1.5maf, we’ve got a locked-in allocation of 16.5 million acre feet. But we now know there’s not, on average, that much water in the river.

I’m intrigued by the people who, back when the plans were being laid out, warned about the problem. My latest example is the Colorado River Board on the Boulder Dam Project, which submitted a report to Congress in 1928. Led by a retired military engineer named William Luther Sibert, the board concluded that there was probably a million acre feet per year less water in the Colorado River than folks thought:

It is quite probable that the compact attempts to apportion more water than the actual average undepleted flow of the river.

The Sibert Board’s proposed solution seems to have been to screw Mexico:

It is of much economic importance that an agreement limiting the amount of water assignable to Mexico should be made prior to the completion of the Boulder Dam project.

(Quotes from a 1929 Bureau of Reclamation summary of Sibert’s report.)

The problem, as the late Norris Hundley explained in his invaluable Water and the West, is that measuring the river was a really hard problem, and the tools of the day really weren’t up to the task. But, interestingly, when uncertainties arose, the folks building the massive plumbing system (both physical and institutional plumbing) tended to go with the higher numbers.

Go figure.

My own Salt Dream

Posted by on

As we speak, there’s this screamin’ deal on ebay:

This well known resort area is located in Southern California at the western end of Imperial County. Popular activities at the Salton Sea State Recreation Area include boating, water-skiing, fishing, jet-skiing, hiking, birdwatching, and sailboarding. It is estimated that over 1 million visitors spend time at the Salton Sea each year. Salton City and the surrounding communities saw a large influx of building and development over the last 7 years or so. A new casino, commercial center and tract homes were some of many projects.

Five acres. “The parcel has an existing easement for a road and has some very nice views.” Current high bid $810. Here’s a picture:

Desert Paradise

Desert Paradise


For more background: Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California

Scandalous Santa Fe Reporter cover

Posted by on

This cover from the Santa Fe Reporter, New Mexico’s favorite alt-weekly, has created a bit of a ruckus:

Santa Fe Reporter

Santa Fe Reporter

No, I’m not talking about the bikini-clad Lady of Gaudalupe. I’m talking about the saguaros, those two tall-armed cacti in the distance. This outrage must not stand.

“New Mexico?” Chris Clarke wrote last year. “No tienen saguaros.” But to prove that I take my cactus humor seriously, I kid you not, we’re actually trying to grow a saguaro in our Albuquerque front yard – our living joke on all those tight-asses like, say, me, who like to complain about saguaros in New Mexico iconography:

spiky

Spikey

Me: “How do we spell ‘Spikey’?”

Lissa: “Dunno. I don’t think he’s alive.’

An aqueduct to replenish the Ogallala?

Posted by on

Wayne Bossert, who manages the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District No. 4, has a post up this morning about an idea being kicked around by his colleagues to the south to build an aqueduct to move Missouri River water westward to replenish supplies in depleted Ogallala-dependent communities:

The proposal is to transfer high flows west – four million AF per year capacity – thus assisting the adjacent and downstream states by reducing flood flows and the damage they do. A series of bank storage collector wells would collect the flows and place the water into the aqueduct. The aqueduct would provide water along the way to various users (municipal, ag and industrial), generate power, be a lazy-river tourist attraction, and pull any other duties such a supply of water can be harnessed to do. It would terminate in a new, man-made, 700,000 AF reservoir in west-central Kansas. From there it would need to be further distributed – mainly dedicated to irrigated agriculture for taking some stress off the Ogallala groundwater use.

What do you think? Is this a sensible idea?

 

Stuff I helped create elsewhere: “Is fire good? Is fire bad”?

Posted by on

Big package in the Sunday newspaper and on line triggered by a visit to the Jemez Mountains by Journal multimedia guy Pat Vasquez-Cunningham and myself to spend time with Tom Swetnam:

The son of the National Forest Service’s Jemez district ranger, Swetnam grew up with a hand-cranked phone in the front bedroom, hardwired to the fire tower. “All through the early 20th century Forest Service, their mission was to put fire out, and I grew up with that,” Swetnam said.

Pat’s video captures the complexity of Tom’s views on fire:

And our graphics guru Cathryn Cunningham worked with data from Bandelier National Monument graphics guru Kay Beeley to make this remarkable bit of map-based storytelling that goes with it:

 

In Colorado River water, sharing the shortages versus suing the bastards

Posted by on

From a June 13 appearance on KNPR in Las Vegas, NV, with Pat Mulroy and Robert Glennon:

States have resorted to lawsuits, and even military action to protect water sources in the past. Lawsuits have a huge downside, and can cost municipalities access to water if they lose.

“What we’ve seen going back to the late 1990s is that it’s in their best interest not to fight,” said John Fleck, reporter for the Albuquerque Journal. “It’s much better for the water managers to understand how the shortage is going to be shared.”

You can listen to the whole thing here.