Breakfast with Beethoven this morning while reading an excellent article by my colleague Tania Soussan on the last decade’s history of water struggles on the middle Rio Grande. For readers outside the newspaper’s circulation area, the problem of climate variability hammered us in the mid to late 1990s when a two-decade pluvial switched off and things got dry:

Ten years ago this month, drought hit the Middle Rio Grande, delivering a wake-up call to a region that had been enjoying a stretch of winters with abundant rain and snow.

“It was kind of a rude awakening,” said Steve Hansen, assistant regional manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. “We weren’t even thinking about (water). We were just kind of wet and happy.”