The Bougainvillea is justly classed among the most showy of our climbers and when planted beside a veranda or when allowed to climb on a tall tree or building gives gorgeous effects.
– Gardening in California: Landscape and Flower, by John McLaren, 1914
Bougainvillea, Plant World, Albuquerque, April 2014, by John Fleck
Also from this morning’s paper, a tougher stance from the New Mexico Environment Department on progress (or lack thereof) in cleaning up a massive groundwater mess beneath Kirtland Air Force Base and adjacent Albuquerque neighborhoods:
The letter provided to the Journal is an expression of increasing Environment Department frustration with the cleanup progress. A month ago, in response to Journal questions about progress in meeting cleanup milestones, Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn issued a statement saying, “While we are by no means satisfied with the amount of time it has taken to make meaningful progress on this situation, we are encouraged by the Air Force’s efforts over the past 6 months.”
The April 24 letter takes a sterner tone, complaining about “an overall lack of attention to detail for a matter that is of the utmost importance to NMED and the State of New Mexico.”
Poor-quality work by the Air Force and its contractor, CB&I, “has jeopardized the achievement of the interim measures by the specified deadlines,” state Environmental Health Division Director Tom Blaine wrote.
From this morning’s paper, a visit to Embudo, where stream U.S. stream flow measurement began:
In the world of U.S. water management, this narrow strip where the river funnels between high bluffs is historic.
Powell, most famous as the first person to survey the Grand Canyon, had realized that the ambitions of the continent’s European immigrants spreading west across North America were running up against an arid reality that Easterners failed to understand. Collective effort would be needed to confront the region’s aridity,
Powell realized, and one of the first things the young nation needed was to measure how much water there was in the rivers.
The perception of many residents that the drought gravely threatened their pocketbook and way of life was more often than not an exaggeration. Such irrational reactions were in part driven by the media’s coverage of the drought. Water, usually taken for granted and ignored, became their lead story as the drought continued. Video from helicopters circling near dry reservoirs and of antagonistic confrontations in surprisingly full water District board rooms made good copy as news reports. Yet most media sources were largely unable or unwilling to convey the more complex and prosaic aspects of water management. In particular, the gulf between traditional water policies and practices and a changing context of supply and demand had widened over many years, and therefore could not be captured on camera. Thus, media sources often responded to public interest in the drought, not by providing adequate background knowledge, but by exaggerating or distorting the actual nature of the scarcity problem.
Tom Waller, describing the 1980s California drought, in “Expertise, Elites, and Resource Management Reform”, Journal of Political Ecology, 1994
Godfrey Sykes, Map of the Colorado River Delta, 1905
When Daniel Trembley MacDougal of the New York Botanical Garden rode a flood pulse through the Colorado River Delta in 1905, he found a puzzling landscape – one of the most arid regions of North America sliced through by “swampy jungles”. At a time when beaver was being trapped into oblivion elsewhere, it was a landscape that seemed to MacDougal to offer hope:
The area actually irrigated by the river in normal low water and flood … is surrounded on all sides by desert and salt water, and is in reality a biological island….
The quantity of food furnished by the swampy jungles is sufficient to support a vast amount of native animal life, and furnishes inviting feeding grounds for migrating birds. The countless millions of young willow and poplar shoots supply food for the beaver, which bids well to hold out long in the impassable bayous and swamps against the trapper foe.
Of course it wasn’t trapper foes who reduced the delta’s beaver population but dams upstream that choked off the “swampy jungles” and “impassable bayous”. But a survey done in the 1990s by Eric Mellink and Jaime Luevano found remnant beaver populations did hold out, sometimes even when the only water available was standing, stagnant pools. As long as there were willows and cottonwoods (MacDougal called them “poplars”) Mellink and Luevano found beavers.
When I toured the Laguna CILA (pdf) habitat restoration site in the delta last month, before the Minute 319 environmental pulse flow arrived, we saw a little beaver dam:
beaver dam at Laguna CILA site, March 27, 2014, by John Fleck
Turtle and goose, Rio Grande Nature Center, April 25, 2014
Irrigating a palm oasis from an Imperial Irrigation District canal, by John Fleck, March 2014
One of the fundamental propositions of date culture is that the palm requires a large supply of water for irrigation. This rule is apparently subject to some striking exceptions and future experiments will probably change our ideas on the subject still more, though they can hardly shake the fact that the palm is a water loving plant.
Date Growing in the Old World and the New, Popenoe and Bennett, George Rice and Sons Press, 1913
We’re beginning to see details of a pilot program to conserve water in the Colorado River Basin to prop up declining water levels in the basin’s major reservoirs by paying water users to not use water.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s board last week approved that agency’s $2 million contribution to what would be a $13 million effort funded by the four largest Colorado Basin municipal water users – SNWA, the Central Arizona Project, Denver Water and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, each kicking in $2 million – and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which would kick in $3 million.
A staff report last week from SNWA General Manager John Entsminger to his board (pdf) describes the program thus:
The purpose of the program is to determine if voluntary demand management actions (including agricultural land fallowing, curtailment of industrial uses, municipal conservation, etc.,) would be feasible to create Colorado River system water to mitigate the impacts of ongoing drought.
Las Vegas feels an acute need because dropping reservoir levels threaten its intakes, while everyone feels the drought pinch, Entsminger told his board.
Here’s how Kathryn Sorensen, water services director for the city of Phoenix, described it in a report to her city council this week (pdf):
Under the program, entities entitled to use Colorado River water would be compensated for voluntary reductions in water use, which would create conserved water that would benefit the system through increased reservoir levels. These increased reservoir levels then would forestall or mitigate future shortage declarations.
(h/t Betty Reid at the Arizona Republic for the mention of Phoenix’s interest in this.)
If this goes forward, it’s a potentially significant development in Colorado River Basin water management for a couple of reasons.
First, the mechanism on the surface looks a bit like the “Intentionally Created Surplus” and “Intentionally Created Mexican Allotment” (ICS and ICMA, and yes, they we really pronounce it “ick-ma”) mechanisms. Under those mechanisms, Lower Basin and Mexican water users can get credit for water conservation measures, creating storage banks in Lake Mead. But this new Colorado River Conservation Program would be different in a key way. The water saved wouldn’t be tagged as belonging to any particular water user. It would simply increase the overall amount of water available in the system for all users. (The pseudo-economist in me is curious about free rider problems. A subset of the basin’s water users are paying, everyone benefits. But that’s a subject for later, I guess.) The significance here is a general effort, with money behind it, to increase conservation in the basin as a whole, for the benefit of all.
Second, the effort crosses the Upper Basin-Lower Basin boundary. Denver Water is part of the deal. ICS and ICMA are entirely a Lower Basin/Lake Mead thing. Adding Denver and taking steps to prop up Lake Powell are a big deal.
Entsminger told his board the pilot program would begin this year and run through 2016.
The AP’s Jason Dearen has an update on California communities at risk of running out of water:
In February, the California Department of Public Health listed 17 mostly rural water systems as having less than two months water supply in storage.
But in recent weeks that number has fallen to three.
In February, as media coverage raged around 17 California towns at risk of running out of water in their drought, I ventured an observation and a prediction:
The observation:
[I]n a state with 38,332,521 residents, give or take a few, the fact that only 17 relatively small communities have so far been identified as being at risk of running out of water means that the vast majority of the state’s population is currently not at risk of running out of water in the next 60 to 100 days. In a drought this badassed, it so far looks like most of California’s residents will be able to flush their toilets and brush their teeth for the foreseeable future.
The prediction:
I’m going to boldly predict that most water providers will limp through to the finish line.
It rained, apparently enough to make me look correct. Best, in a situation like this, to be lucky.
(this post has been updated to move the news ahead of my ego)
One of the epic Colorado River stories involves the Great El Niño of 1983, the year they almost lost Glen Canyon Dam. With a massive snowpack melting off in a hurry in June of that year, Lake Powell filled to the spillways, which couldn’t handle the load, and it is said we came close to catastrophe. (See John Weisheit, pdf)
As we head into what may be another big El Niño year, can we expect another big snowpack and a Powell-filling runoff? No.
Paul Miller at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center ran the numbers and sent along this graph of El Niño vs. La Niña and its impact on Colorado River flow:
Colorado River runoff and ENSO, courtesy Paul Miller, CBRFC
“GLDA3” is CBRFC-speak for the natural inflow into Lake Powell – what you’d get if there were no dams. You can see 1983 hanging out there in the upper right – big El Niño, big runoff. But of the nine El Niño years in his data set, three were wet, three were middling, and three were dry. 2002, an epic dry year, was also an El Niño year. Here’s how Paul explains it:
There’s not a huge correlation between ENSO and the Upper Colorado River Basin, where we get most of our water supply….
But there is a bit of correlation in the Lower Colorado River Basin, which, hopefully, will provide a little extra water to the system. Maybe some of that water can be used to meet Mexico water deliveries or southern California agricultural demands, which could potentially reduce releases from Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.