a note of thanks to Tim Brick

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Back in the 1980s, when I was a reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, Tim Brick sold me on the fact that water was a great story.

Pasadena had a municipal water agency, so it made sense that the city hall beat reporter should pay attention. But Tim, Pasadena’s representative on the Metropolitan Water District board of directors, pointed me to the interlocking regional issues involved. It was from Tim that I learned the history of peripheral canals (or the lack thereof) and with him that I took my first deep dive into the stories of Mulholland and Owens Valley and the water management issues surrounding the Colorado River.

Tim’s smart, and funny as hell. I could never quite get my head around my old trouble-making friend as chairman of the board of MWD, the largest municipal water agency in the West.

On Facebook today, I saw that Tim is stepping down after 28 years as Pasadena’s representative to the MWD. He has my undying thanks.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: climate change on the Colorado River

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The science accumulates:

The more greenhouse gases push up temperatures over the next few decades, the more New Mexico’s water supplies are at risk, according to new research by a team of Columbia University scientists.

Using the latest high-resolution global climate simulations, the scientists show evaporation caused by warming temperatures is likely to leave less water for the rivers that flow out of the high country in northern New Mexico and Colorado that supplies much of the state’s water.

The finding is consistent with earlier research. But by using the latest models, which can more accurately account for weather across the region’s complex terrain, the new research gives a clearer picture of the situation, said Richard Seager, the climate scientist who led the team doing the work.

Record dry 2012 at my house

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I’ve been keeping rainfall records as a volunteer National Weather Service observer since 1999. 2012 is the 13th calendar year for which I have complete records for my house, in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights, about a mile northeast of the University of New Mexico. It was my driest on record, at 5.08 inches (12.9 cm). The previous driest year on record was 2011, at 6.03 inches (15.3 cm). The average over my 13 years of record is 9.45 inches (24 cm). The PRISM dataset average for my neighborhood’s pixel is 9.71 inches (24.7 cm).

2013 precipitation

2012 precipitation

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on plumbing and nature

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From this morning’s newspaper, an attempt to frame (in my own mind) the coming “gnarly struggle over the federal Endangered Species Act’s requirement that we try to keep the Rio Grande silvery minnow alive“:

The reason for the river’s November-December surge was a small stockpile of water the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had stashed during the depth of last year’s drought in El Vado Reservoir, up on the Rio Chama. Its purpose was ensure there was enough to complete the irrigation season for the pueblos on the Rio Grande, which have the most senior water rights on the river. With the irrigation season over, the bureau in November began releasing the leftovers, moving the water downstream to Elephant Butte Reservoir north of Las Cruces to meet New Mexico’s obligations under the Rio Grande compact to deliver water to southern New Mexico and Texas.

Drought all year had kept the river through Albuquerque well below normal levels. But suddenly it was flirting with normal levels at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Central Avenue gauge.

It looked nice, but the Rio Grande was simply plumbing at this point, a big earthen canal being used to move water from one dam to another. And yet, for a month, it looked not like plumbing, but like a river.

 

“My Vanishing Hometowns,” a climate change storytelling project

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I first met Christy George a couple of years back on the edge of a lovely lake outside Stockholm, where we spent two glorious days kicking around the joys and struggles of environmental storytelling. Christy is the former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a public broadcasting news veteran and a clever teller of stories. Which is why I’m entranced by her latest project (entranced enough to kick in some crowdfunding and plug it here). It’s called “My Vanishing Hometowns“:

Over my own lifetime, people have changed their attitudes and behavior in diverse and deeply contentious arenas: the civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism, the tax revolt, globalization, attitudes about smoking, capital punishment, political party affiliations, and acceptance of different ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders and races….

I want to know why people made these sweeping changes: what were the catalysts and tipping points, how important were personal motivations versus the zeitgeist of society at large, and can the past can point to paths journalists, educators and scientists can follow when talking about climate change.

 

Imperial farmers are no dummies

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Antoine Abou-Diwan had a story in the Imperial Valley Press (apologies if the link goes away, I think IVP sunsets their stories after a time) capturing the nervous twitches in California’s Imperial Valley over the future allocation of the Colorado River’s water.

Through Friday (source in pdf), IID had diverted 2.9 million acre feet of water, making the agricultural irrigation agency by far the largest water user on the Colorado River. As supplies grow tighter, the folks in the Imperial Valley know full well where people will be looking to try to get more water. Some comments, as reported by Abou-Diwan, following the release earlier this month of the state-federal Basin Study:

While the report outlines various methods that address shortfalls on the Colorado River — from desalination to conservation to water banking — some worry that the agricultural community will be expected to bear most of the burden imposed by shortages.

“You are pitting (urban) populations against agriculture,” said Imperial Irrigation District Director Matt Dessert, when asked what he took away from the conference. Anticipated water shortages make the agricultural community’s pool of water increasingly attractive, he added.

“They’re going to continue to look at ag areas and areas that have water to be squeezed (for more water),” he said.

plumbing as nature

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Riding my bike this morning, I came across a man with a hawk.

I stopped to ask. (How many times do you see a man out taking his hawk for a walk?)

It was a Harris’s hawk, bred in captivity, a native of the southern deserts a little far north of its normal range. He was taking it out to hunt rabbits.

Albuquerque flood control system

Albuquerque’s plumbing

Albuquerque’s northeast heights, which make up the bulk of the city’s populated land area, is a largely post-World War II sprawl of housing developments and strip malls that spreads down a gentle slope from the Sandia Mountains toward the Rio Grande.

Before we interceded in the construction of a city here, the gentle desert plain was cut through with arroyos that carried runoff, mostly from summer rains, to the river. As we built a city, our flood control managers converted many of these arroyos to concrete flood control channels. But a few were left unpaved, and our hawk-walker was following the bike trail on the edge of one such arroyo.

His hawk chased some rabbits, the man told me, but with no success. He wasn’t that hungry, so wasn’t trying that hard. The hawk was impassive as we talked. He’d grown up around humans and was comfortable with us, the hawk man explained. Wild Harris’s hawks are rare in the Albuquerque area. There were two reported sightings on Sandia Pueblo, north of town, in 2011, and a few reports at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge south of Albuquerque, but the bird is primarily a resident of the Chihuahuan Desert, to our south.

But there are native hawks in the flood control system. The hawk man pointed to a clump of trees to our west, and told me a pair of Cooper’s hawks were nesting there. They don’t bother his Harris’s hawk at this time of year, the man said, but will chase him away come spring when their children need the rabbits.

So here you have layers of nature threaded through the city – a flood control system taking over an old natural arroyo, but leaving enough unpaved for an ecosystem to develop that can support rabbits and Cooper’s hawks. And a human with his Harris’s hawk as well.

Plumbing as nature.

“Albuquerque is not a city”

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Albuquerque is not a city, even as its metropolitan-area population approaches one million. That is, it cannot imagine itself a city because to do so would negate its reason for being, its biggest draw for tourists and refugees from Los Angeles and other large cities. Despite the sprawl, it thinks of itself as a town, a provincial way station set between a mountain and a mesa, bisected by the Rio Grande and its verdant cottonwood “bosque”.

Rubén Martínez, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West