There’s a “half full/half empty” joke in here somewhere. The reservoirs of the Colorado River Basin are 49 percent full/51 percent empty right now (data pdf). Despite another bad runoff year, that’s pretty much exactly where they were at the end of 2015. Let’s go with half full then, shall we? We’ve come within a couple …
Carey McWilliams said this about the life of the orange tree and those who grew it: With its rich black-green shade, its evergreen foliage, and its romantic fragrance, it is the millionaire of all the trees of America…. The aristocrat of the orchards, it has, by a natural affinity drawn to it the rich and …
[T]he maximum discharge known outside the period of record was about 8500 m³sec¯¹ on July 7, 1884. According to E. C. LaRue (1925), during this flood, a resident of Lees Ferry rescued his cat from the branches of an apple tree. Decades later, the resident, with “the height of the water on the trunk of …
Continue reading ‘The Lee’s Ferry flood of record and the cat in the tree’ »
One of my new lectures this semester for UNM Water Resources Program students tackled the question of where and how you draw boundaries around a water management problem. The example I worked through was the Colorado River and the U.S.-Mexico border. You have water management institutions and governance that are largely separate on each side …
Continue reading ‘In western water management, the rest of us nervously watch California’ »
LA Times on the eve of the release of the EIS on Sacramento Delta water diversion tunnels: Talks are ongoing over the Colorado River, where drought and increasing demand from Arizona and Nevada may reduce California’s share. If the tunnels are never built, the Met will need to drive a harder bargain on the Colorado to …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta-Colorado River connection’ »
“We are not going to get the Drought Contingency Plan completed.” That was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s Jeff Kightlinger this morning during the opening panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas. It was a very public expression of something that has been increasingly clear in recent weeks …
With the Colorado River water management community converging on Las Vegas this week, we are likely to learn more about whether or when we’ll see a deal on the long-awaited “Drought Contingency Plan” to reduce Lower Basin use of water from Lake Mead. Under the DCP, which has been in nearly final form for the …
Continue reading ‘How Arizona plans to help reduce the pressure on Lake Mead’ »
When I was writing my book, I wanted to talk about water use in cities through the story of a single city, and I chose Las Vegas (Nevada, not the one in New Mexico) intentionally as a rhetorical device. One of the writer’s tricks is to start readers on familiar terrain and lead them to …
I’ve seen this more than once: Fifteen percent of all U.S. crops are grown with irrigation water that originates in the Colorado River Basin. That’s from an Alternet piece, and it’s a number I’ve seen repeated many times (see here, here, here for just a few of the many examples). I am skeptical. I’ve been unable …
Continue reading ‘Is Colorado River water responsible for 15 percent of U.S. crops?’ »