When Arroyos Run

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aerial photo of Albuquerque, date uncertainIt was pouring rain when I left the office this evening, so I took surface streets rather than the messy freeway. The concrete arroyo by my work was running high as I passed, so I started slowing and watching every time I went over one. They were raging and roiling and doing their best to remind me of a point I often miss living here in the city.

I was talking to a pal the other day who’d been looking at old aerial photographs of the city. She was describing the mental exercise of mapping the old landscape to the new. The included picture, courtesy of the University of New Mexico’s Earth Data Analysis Center, is worth a click through if you’re from Albuquerque and want to understand what she was talking about. I don’t know when it was taken (my guess is the 1930s). Up near the picture’s right-hand corner, right about under the “6”, is where my house is today.

The developed part of the picture is primarily the Rio Grande valley floor, and you can see all the old arroyos cutting their own way down from what is now the city’s eastern heights. Every one of those arroyos is now gone – in fact, the entire area visible in the picture is paved over save a strip along the river. But the water still has to go somewhere, so we’ve substituted a spiderweb of concrete arroyos for the old dirt ones. It’s a way of containing that which cannot be controlled.

Must’ve been something to see the water come down those arroyos back in the day.

Wim!

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From Sam Abt:

In a battle with no prize and slight prestige, Wim Vansevenant, a Belgian with Predictor, finished as the lanterne rouge, or last man in the pack, for the second successive year.

He thrashed his nearest rival, Geraint Thomas, a Briton with Barloworld, by six minutes with a sterling 134th place in the time trial on Saturday.

Monsoon Variability

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I got a note last week from a California resident thinking about moving to New Mexico. She had a lot of great questions, including wanting to know more about this “monsoon” thing. I tried to explain that it’s not a big massive raining all the time in all the places sort of thing. Here’s the data:

In Bernalillo County, where I live, we’ve got 16 volunteer weather stations that have reported in to the COCORAHS network every day this month. The mean/median (essentially the same) is 1.1 inch (28 mm). Half the reports fall between 0.7 and 1.4 inch (18 and 36 mm). Max: 2.1 inch (53 mm). Min: 0.4 inch (10 mm).

That’s the spatial variability that happens when one small storm cell after another rakes across town. Some hit the rain gauge. Some don’t.

The Value of Water in Alternative Uses

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I recently scored a fascinating volume at the used bookstore: “The Value of Water in Alternative Uses, With Special Application to Water Use in the San Juan and Rio Grande Basins of New Mexico.” Published in 1962, it’s the result of a study of the economics of various ways of allocating New Mexico’s water.Given that I’ve been writing about this of late, I was intrigued see what people were saying about it 45 years ago. The answer? Pretty much exactly what we’re saying today.

Within roughly one half of the United States – the area from the 100th meridian westward except for the Columbia River basin and adjacent coastal streams – a transfer of water demand from one point to another will have no effect on the over-all shortage, since the entire region’s projected demand for water is substantially greater than the region’s maximum regulated flow.

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Why Not Just Let ‘Em All Dope?

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If you’re in anyway following Le Tour, you’ve almost certainly had a conversation over the last week about whether it would make sense to just let ’em all dope. Joe Lindsey from Bicycling magazine has a thoughtful guest post over on the Freakonomics blog making a pretty persuasive case that it’s a bad idea. A couple of central points:

  • Good dope is expensive. If it were legalized, winning would favor, even more, the wealthiest competitors and teams.
  • The best dope, like the cows blood crap Rasmussen is accused of trying to smuggle out of the United States, is illegal for human use.
  • Lots of riders don’t want to dope. They’re already screwed under the current system, but if doping were legalized, they’d be really screwed.

And on a related note: below the fold, the Wikipedia list of cyclists who have “trained in Italy“. You might want to print out this list and keep it handy to compare with the riders on the podium tomorrow in Paris:
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Axel

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Axel MerckxWhat Dave said.

It’s just sport, just a game, completely meaningless as compared to the plague of development on Albuquerque’s west side or that Darfur thing. But there it is, unfolding like a gut-gripping soap opera that you know is playing out in real time with no safety net.

So Vinokourov must be dead to me (but a tragic figure?) and Rasmussen, he was in “Italy.” And the poor boys on the ITV podcast last night were beside themselves with the hurt to their sport.

And then today, there is Axel Merckx, as iconic a figure as you’ll find in the peloton, getting away in a four-man breakaway, on the verge of retirement from the sport, speeding down the roads of France past little knots of cheering fans. And on his shoulder, Michael Boogerd, sharing the pace making. If there is a victim of Rasmussen’s evil in this soap opera, it is Boogerd, the faithful assistant who banged his way up mountain slopes for a team leader who has turned in the public eye to a disgraced, dirty cheat. The work, the work, for nothing. And then Sandy Casar, his hip bloodied by a crash, pulling away at the finish line.

If I were the soap opera’s writer, with my own grasp of story arc, it would have been Merckx or Boogerd taking the stage, but the ending – Casar’s bloody ass pulling away 500 meters from the line – was so epic that the writers did just fine, thank you very much. And there was Merckx after the stage, tears behind his sunglasses, talking about what it meant to ride all day past those cheering fans, about to leave the sport he grew up in, the sport he loves.

Water in the Desert

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I’m still on the steep lower slopes of the learning curve regarding the relationship between development and water, so I don’t have much to say about this except to say that it’s fascinating:

Development of the 6,500-acre Quail Ranch is dead, at least for the time being.
Sandia Properties has dropped plans to develop the giant master-planned community on the far West Side.
“We’re getting out of the business of large, long-term projects,” said Bob Murphy, president of Sandia Properties and an established developer in the Albuquerque metro area.
The company has had the 6,500-acre tract under contract for more than three years, during which time it has worked on lining up the financing and utilities.
Water was a key issue in the decision to drop the project, Murphy said.

The relationship between water and this project is complicated, but I’m not aware of any other major project dropped in this same way over water issues.