Photo courtesy Nora Heineman-Fleck, of me in the backyard geeking on a bird. As an aside, I was wearing my City Lights Bookstore t-shirt when Nora took this Saturday. Nora, by a coincidence, was also wearing hers. Probably just dumb luck, but I like the mystery of father-daughter stuff, so I read great import into it.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere a While Ago: Rainwater Harvesting in NM
I forgot my usual Inkstain link last week to a piece I wrote for the newspaper about the strange world of rainwater harvesting law in New Mexico. David Zetland was on about this last September, asking about the legality of rainwater harvesting in various U.S. states. My short answer, in the comments, was, essentially “kinda sorta maybe” for New Mexico.
My longer answer, in last Tuesday’s Albuquerque Journal, was that it depends on what you’re using the water for (some sort of sub. or ad maybe req.):
This goes back to the first part of the state’s policy: the rule that when you’re capturing rainwater, you can’t reduce the runoff that would have come off your property “in its natural, pre-development state.”
In the strange world of water law, the portion of the rain and snow that falls on your property that would have run off before it was developed isn’t yours. It belongs in a legal sense to the myriad water rights holders downstream from you. It can be used by farmers and cities that have a pre-existing right to draw water from the state’s rivers and streams for their use. Or the water can be used to meet New Mexico’s legal obligations under the Rio Grande Compact to deliver water to Texas.
Water News
- My head’s been spinning trying to follow discussions over California’s pending water legislation. Emily Green has helpfully rounded it all up in one spot: “Potential cost? $12bn. Who will it affect? Every Californian who needs water.”
- George Johnson on Santa Fe’s water budget: “For all its aspirations to be different, Santa Fe is still guided by a rather ordinary assumption: that the primary use for water is to accommodate more development.”
- Rosalie Rayburn on the next steps toward New Mexico’s first desal project. Note the echo of George’s theme here re the “d” word: “Desalination tests will begin next week on a Rio Puerco water source that Sandoval County officials believe will be critical to future development”
How Dry Southern California?
JPL climate scientist Bill Patzert wrote a nice op ed in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune about weather, climate and fire that got me thinking about my old home turf of Southern California yesterday:
What set us up for these fires? Rain has been scarce. A large-scale drought has strangled the American Southwest for almost a decade, four years of below-normal rainfall have parched the Southland, and six months with almost no rain at all have turned our foothills dangerously dry.
I’m more focused on my part of the southwest now, so I haven’t followed the numbers closely, but was amazed when I went back and looked at the data:
Annual Precipitation, California South Coast Climate Division, courtesy WRCC
That’s the annual precipitation for 12-month periods ending in August (not a normal window of time, but it allowed me to capture the last 12 months). The green line is the long term average. In the last decade, there has been one unusually wet year, two that were sort of average, and the other seven have been extremely dry.
But here’s the kicker in terms of thinking about drought conditions. Remember my new meme – it’s not just precip, it’s evaporation? Look at the temperatures:
Average Temperatures, California South Coast Climate Division
Again, green is average.
Yowza.
Elephant Diaries: Career Advice From The President
I’d like to think the President of the United States has the best interests of America’s children in mind with this school address thing that has generated such a kerfuffle. But after reading the advance text, I’m not so sure:
Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. (emphasis added)
OMG! He’s encouraging kids to go to work for a newspaper!
Wen Ho Lee: A Limerick
Giving my desk at work its Labor Day holiday shift cleaning (I’m the warm body in case news happens), I stumbled across a bit of history: the notebook from the day nine years ago when Wen Ho Lee made the first of a series of appearances federal court that ended his prosecution as the spy who wasn’t really a spy after all. Lee ended up pleading guilty that week to a single count of improperly downloading classified material and walked out of the federal courthouse in Albuquerque a free man.
I was not the newspaper’s lead reporter on the story, but I had been there the day he was indicted (Ian Hoffman, who was our lead reporter and later co-wrote the definitive book on the case, was off fishing on the day of Lee’s arrest and indictment). It was history, and I figured I had to be there the day it ended, too, so I “volunteered” to help Ian out with the courtroom scene.
The notebook is labeled simply “The End.” On the first page, while I was sitting in court waiting for Lee to appear, I had penned the opening lines of a limerick:
There was an old doctor named Lee
Who wondered what fuss there might be.
Downloaded some codes…
Apparently court started at that point, because the limerick is left hanging, followed at that point by a description of Lee walking in with a “big grin.”
I welcome suggestions for the limerick’s conclusion.
Water news
I spend a lot of time these days reading water news. When I read something good, I often blurt it out on my twitter feed, which is good for that sort of link sharing. But one of the problems with the disjointed nature of social media right now is the way different communities use different social media in different ways. We’ve got cool new tools, but divergence in terms of who uses which ones. Some folks interact via email lists, some via interlocking blog conversations, some via Facebook, some via twitter, some via some overlapping set of the above.
What follows is an experiment in sharing these squibs here as well which, if it works, may become a regular feature. Or not:
- From the LA Times, drought in Mexico: “The sparse rainfall nationwide has made 2009 the driest in 69 years of government record-keeping, Arreguin said.”
- Peter Gleick on an example of questionable federal cost-benefit analysis of a proposed dam: “The people receiving the benefits are not the people bearing the costs, many of which are public, environment, and cultural.” (h/t WaterWired)
- The AP’s Ben Neary has been doing great work on entrepreneur Aaron Million’s proposal to pipe water from Wyoming to Colorado’s Front Range cities. Reporting out of Cheyenne, Neary reported this weekend that Million is considering scaling back the project: “Million said he is re-evaluating what would be a reasonable size for the pipeline project. He said he doesn’t have a figure yet of how much water he may apply to take from the river if he reduces his application.”
Water in the Albuquerque Mayoral Race
Somewhat surprisingly to me, Albuquerque’s water future has become an issue in our upcoming mayoral election. My Journal colleague Sean Olson, who used to cover the Water Utility Authority and now covers politics, interviewed the candidates for a piece in this morning’s paper:
You can’t talk about Albuquerque’s future without talking about water, and the current crop of candidates for mayor is starting to wade in.
The San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project opened this year to provide surface water to the city, a 50-years-in-the-making public works project that will wean the city off heavy pumping of the underground aquifer.
But the new system comes with a cost: Mandatory conservation measures imposed by the state water engineer require the city to drop from the current 162 gallons a person average to 155 gallons per day or face the prospect of losing the new water source.
With Albuquerque’s Oct. 6 election nearing, the Journal interviewed the three candidates for mayor about conservation measures, future planning and a water utility that is not directly controlled by the city. In the broadest sense, they were quizzed about how they would approach Albuquerque’s water future.
The issue is a bit tangled because the Water Utility Authority is separate from city government, but the mayor (or his representative) sits on the water utility’s board, and municipal decisions on things like land use planning and building codes play a central role in our water future.
“a valueless and horrible desert”
I’m puzzling over the real story of Oliver Meredith Wozencraft, the chap who was arguably the first person to imagine the large-scale irrigation of the deserts of the southwest with water from the Colorado River.
Oliver Meredith Wozencraft
Wozencraft was a physician who came west in 1849 in search of gold and stumbled instead (apparently quite literally) onto the dream of irrigation of what came to be known as “the Imperial Valley”. But the details of the stumbling seem a bit murky.
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
For the water geeks in the audience, I highly recommend this movie, which my sister, Lisa, Netflixed for us this weekend:
(h/t Karl Flessa for suggesting it)