Doing reading for the new book on early 1920s Albuquerque, as business leaders pursued what would become the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, I see the regular return of a phrase I’d come to see frequently my reading of Colorado River history in the same time period: the flood menace Here’s the Albuquerque Journal, reporting …
Continue reading ‘the rise and fall of “the flood menace”’ »
An exchange on Twitter about the definition of “dead pool” sent me back to Jack Schmidt et al’s extremely useful (and now extremely relevant) 2016 analysis of what would be required to empty Lake Powell and move all the water down to Lake Mead. It’s the thing that disabused me of my simplistic notion that …
It’s taking me a while to figure exactly what “the new book” is about. In an early manifestation (I recall such things based on the names of computer file folders of my scribblings) it was called “the ghost of water”. The idea was to find threads of the past in the stuff we built to …
Colorado River political and policy discourse is tangled right now around an increasingly unhelpful set of questions. They involve process: Should the federal government step in and impose cuts? Should the Lower Basin states, especially Arizona and California, do more to save themselves? Should we pay farmers to fallow? How much? Should the Upper Basin …
Continue reading ‘a Colorado River hypothetical and an attention-getting cuss word’ »
Helpful piece by Luke Runyon on steps toward accounting for Lower Colorado River evaporation and riparian system losses. During a September Colorado River symposium held in Santa Fe, both Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told attendees that the issue of evaporation and transit loss in the Lower …
Continue reading ‘Accounting for Colorado River evaporation’ »
I don’t see how this ends well. Most of the major players – the ones that matter, anyway, by which I mean Arizona, California, and the federal government – appear boxed in by constraints they can’t seem to overcome, while the water in the Colorado River’s big reservoirs is circling the drains. Arizona’s giving up …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River at the end of water year 2022: a status report’ »
By Eric Kuhn, John Fleck, and Jack Schmidt With most forecasts pointing toward another below-average winter of precipitation in the Rocky Mountains in 2022/2023 and with total basin-wide reservoir storage now less than 20 maf (less than 17 months of supply at the rate water has been consumed in the basin since 2000), it is …
A paragraph from the new book Bob Berrens and I are writing about the Rio Grande and the making of modern Albuquerque: To understand a community – any community – you can start with its water. Collective problem-solving, collective action, lies at the core of community, and our relationship with our water requires us to …
Continue reading ‘Collective Action and the Ribbons of Green’ »
The White House announced today it has appointed Anne Castle as the federal representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. Anne is former Assistant Secretary of Interior For Water and Science, where she helped steer the federal boat through chaotic Colorado River rapids. She’ll be an important asset now that the rapids seem that much …
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Count me among those in the Colorado River community who was disappointed last month with the lack of Department of Interior action on its threats should the states not come up with a plan to sufficiently reduce their water use. But let’s remember the core issue here: the states of the basin, especially the Lower …
Continue reading ‘A reminder that the federal government does not use Colorado River water’ »