In Colossus, Michael Hiltzik talks about the way Hoover Dam, during its construction, became a tourist spectacle. When Lissa and I were in Boulder City last week, I found this in the museum-y hallway at the Boulder Dam Brewing Company (which has a lovely collection of similar memorabilia), a poster hawking tours: THE MAKING OF …
Not being up in Colorado, I don’t have a good feel for how seriously to take Aaron Million’s Flaming Gorge pipeline proposal. My hallway conversations at CRWUA left me with the feeling that not a lot of people in the basin take it very seriously, but I don’t know water issues in the state of …
Some more odds and ends from last week’s Colorado River Water Users Association meeting Yuma Desalting Plant The trial run of the Yuma Desalting Plant “went well,” according to Terry Fulp, head of the USBR Lower Colorado office. YPD was built in the early 1990s to clean up icky agricultural drain water to meet US …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Water Users, odds and ends’ »
Weird shit, well lit
For better or worse, my decision to not pay the $15 a day for an internet connection at Caeser’s Palace has left me with a bow wave of things to write about after a week spent in an around the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, NV. Let’s start with Lake …
Continue reading ‘A drought of the Lower Colorado River Basin’s own making’ »
Standing at the Grand Canyon’s south rim this evening at sunset, I saw a woman walk up clutching her luggage, spellbound. “Oh my God,” she said. The look on her face said everything. She was seeing it for the first time. She’d come to celebrate an “important birthday”, and said she wanted to spend it …
Thrown on driveways ’round town last week: The New Mexico Court of Appeals has turned into the state’s chief water policy nag. Three times in a little more than a year, most recently last week, the court issued rulings tinged with exasperation at the need to apply 20th century New Mexico water law to 21st …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico water law needs to catch up with reality’ »
Another example that the old New West development model isn’t working: Next spring, water bills will rise to help pay the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s mounting debt used to fund some $3.3 billion in pumps, pipes and intakes installed over the past several years. The fee, which comes on top of other recent increases, is …
Solving the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance is easy. There are lots of ways to do it. stop farming the Imperial Valley get rid of all those Phoenix lawns get rid of Phoenix! give all the water to the Indians (they were here first, after all) and let them parcel it out Solar powered desal! OK, …
FYI, I’ll be at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas next week, if any of the water wonks out there will also be in attendance and wanna get together, maybe go throw rocks in the Bellagio Fountain or something?