The US Bureau of Reclamation announced today that they’ve completed the pilot run of their Yuma Desalting Plant, cleaning up 30,000 acre feet of really crappy ag drain water. (“Crappy ag drain water” – my words, not theirs). From Joyce Lobeck in the Yuma Sun (and seldom was their a more appropriately named newspaper): Undertaken …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Yuma Plant Completes Pilot Run’ »
When the science team working on the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) invited me to give a media-communication perspective at a meeting back in the summer of 2006, I titled my talk “Maybe We Shouldn’t Call It `Drought’”. The problem is that the word is used in so many different ways, meaning so many different …
I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt about the water issues that so obsess us here in the Southwestern United States. Most of us have running water in our homes. It’s remarkably free of contaminants and pathogens. The arguments we have are generally about how to distribute this bounty, not whether we have it at …
Spending a weekend (mostly) unplugged (I’m writing this on my iPod), Lissa and I ended up this afternoon at the Georgia O’Keeffe in Santa Fe. In one alcove, photos of O’Keeffe on the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, circa 1964 – the year they closed the dam and began flooding it. Apparently her friend Eliot …
From the morning paper (sub/ad req): Groundwater contamination from a Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill has spread farther than previously believed, according to a report presented to municipal water officials Wednesday. A new test well drilled by the Air Force last year beneath a southeast Albuquerque neighborhood shows evidence of contamination, two blocks …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: latest on the jet fuel plume’ »
This week’s column, in which I play the national security card (sub/ad req): These are the same folks responsible for maintaining our nuclear deterrent. They are thinking this way because the language of risk and uncertainty is familiar to people in the national security community, and it is their job to think about and help …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: In Uncertainty Lies Risk’ »
About that whole Colorado River shortage thing? Chill. From a Central Arizona Project statement sent ’round to reporters today: According to the Bureau of Reclamation, current conditions on the Colorado River indicate a 97 percent probability that more than 2.5 million acre-feet (more than 850 billion gallons) of additional river water will flow from Lake …
Another happy discovery from the hard drive cleanup project. I’m thinking this is from 2003 or ’04, maybe?
Out on assignment yesterday we found ourselves on the stretch of New Mexico Highway 60 that crosses the Plains of San Agustin, out by the Very Large Array, I got to thinking about long straight roads. Between Magdalena and Datil, 60 runs 23 miles of absolute straight, not a single bend or deviation: It’s …
Via the work blog, a hilarious tidbit from this morning’s New Mexico Drought Monitoring Working Group meeting – a Special Weather Statement sent out Saturday by the El Paso office of the National Weather Service: For the last several weeks parts of the Rio Grande have gone completely dry…especially on El Paso’s west side. Many …