Go Cards

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Lissa and I flew to St. Louis two weeks ago to visit a dying old man we love very much.

Bill’s been very sick. Lissa called in September to say we wanted to come see him, but he put us off. He didn’t want us to see him that way, to remember him that way. But then he changed his mind, called Lissa in what was either a moment of great weakness or great strength, or both, and asked us to come.

World Champion 1944 Cardinals

World Champion 1944 St. Louis Cardinals

Family roots on Lissa’s side go back a ways in Missouri, and even though I’m distant from it, and we’re mostly disconnected from the place other than her Uncle Bill, I love having married into that. I’m from California, where place is mostly shallow. St. Louis feels deep.

Bill was staying with a friend in a brick row house in the old Irish neighborhood they call “Dogtown”. Climbing the flight of stairs to see him felt as though we were passing through a window in time. It was hot, and they had a window open with a fan blowing.

I don’t want to oversell the trip-back-in-time thing, because Bill was in many ways a modern man. He drove a Mini Cooper. But he was rooted in a different time. He had no use for cable, and listened to baseball on the radio.

He didn’t have the energy for much, but we grabbed the hours with him we could, mostly sitting on the couch in the upstairs row house living room.

Our trip put us in St. Louis Friday, Oct. 7, the night the Cards beat the Phillies in what was apparently an epic 1-0 game to advance to the National League Championship Series. I say apparently, because Lissa and I didn’t notice until we saw it in the paper the next morning. We were kinda distracted.

When we saw Bill that morning, he told us he’d listened to the game on the radio. He seemed to have enjoyed it, as much as he could enjoy anything.

Baseball’s been all tarted up with cable TV pizzazz – graphics that show where the pitch went and super-slow-mo and “catcher cam”. But at its heart, from Bill’s time, it is a tale for radio, a game suited to simple story-telling. It’s not that Bill was a sports fan. It’s that, in his time, listening to the Cardinals on the radio on a fall evening when they had a chance to make the World Series was what you did.

Bill died Tuesday.

Go Cards.

Drilling for water, Vegas style

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SNWA tunnel boring machine

The scale of the “third straw” Las Vegas is poking into Lake Mead is one of those made-for-journalism anecdotes that tells the story of a great western city’s thirst.

The new intake is insurance that Vegas can still get water from Mead if lake levels drop below intakes one and two, a tacit admission of the realities of the supply demand mismatch on the Colorado. Like I said, an anecdote made in journalist heaven, a big problem reified by massive engineering and fancy gizmos. What does Las Vegas think of its its down side risk? Enough that it is willing to do this:

Southern Nevada’s newest piece of mega-hardware—a custom, $25-million Herrenknecht tunneling boring machine—makes its long-awaited underground debut later this year.

The machine works like a giant mechanical earthworm, gnawing through dirt, rock and muck, forming a protective tunnel that will eventually channel raw Colorado River water onto nearby treatment plants before being pumped to homes and businesses throughout the Las Vegas valley.

The 1,800-ton, 600-ft-long TBM is the workhorse of a $526.6-million third raw-water intake tunnel project at Lake Mead, 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. A joint venture of S.A. Healy Co., Lombard, Ill., and Impreglio S.p.A., Sesto San Giovanni, Italy, known as Vegas Tunnel Constructors LLC, is the design-build contractor.

 

There seems to be a lot of water in Lake Mead. Relatively speaking.

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With the latest monthly report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, we now have end-of-water year numbers, and a chance to take stock. It’s been a terrific year for water supply on the Colorado River system:

  • Lake Mead ended the year with a surface elevation of 1,116 feet above sea level, up 32 feet from a year ago when I was out in Nevada crying wolf. In wet water terms, that’s an increase of 2.9 million acre feet.
  • Lake Powell is up 19 feet over last year.
  • Most importantly, total storage is up 5.2 million acre feet over a year ago. That’s real water, and a lot of it.

Here’s my total water storage graphic, updated with the latest numbers (data here):

Total water in storage, Mead and Powell

Total water in storage, Mead and Powell, data courtesy USBR

For a clearer picture of the current situation, here’s the same data from 1998 to the present:

Mead, Powell storage since 1998

Mead, Powell storage since 1998

But if you squint and look closely, you can still see wolves in the distance.

There remains a lot of empty, though less than a year ago. You also can see the dramatic drop during the dry years of the early 2000’s. Recall we’re up 5.2 maf this year. But we’ve seen drops of 4 maf or more four times in the last decade. Another good year could push things up, but this year’s bounty also could be largely wiped out by a single bad year.

But here’s the real wolf, and it’s actually closer than you think. The total release from Lake Powell this year, the amount sent downstream by the Upper Basin for use in the Lower Basin, was 12.5 million acre feet. The basic requirement under the Colorado River Compact is release of 8.2 maf per year. That’s the Lower Basin’s guaranteed allotment. I like to think of the 4.3 maf as “bonus water”. But remember Mead only went up 2.9 maf. The 1.4 maf difference is the ongoing Lower Basin problem of using more water than it can count on in the long term.

As a refresher on the problem, here’s the simple math:

courtesy USBR

1.2 million acre feet, 1.4 million acre feet, whatever. What’s a few hundred thousand acre feet of water among friends?

In praise of nerd culture

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This blog post has two introductions:

1) When I grew up in the far suburbs of Los Angeles, I was surrounded by aerospace culture. It drove our economy and employed many of my friends’ parents. Or,

2) When I was searching for an “expert” to help me in my epic 1980s journalistic debunking of Rose Parade size claims, I turned to a clever and witty local skpetic named Al Hibbs.

Which brings me to this lovely essay in Zócalo about the way aerospace culture helped define Southern California:

Consider Al Hibbs, whose papers recently arrived in the aerospace archive. As a young mathematician, Hibbs calculated probabilities in Las Vegas casinos and sailed the Caribbean for a year on his winnings. (Along the way, he trapped alligators to sell to zoos.) He went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics at Caltech and to help design the early space program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He also popularized science on radio and television, flew sailplanes, invented an electronic trombone, applied to the astronaut corps, acted in local theater, and pursued underwater photography and kinetic sculpture.

Hibbs may be an extreme example, but Southern California aerospace abounds with ostensible nerds who designed new ways of having fun when they weren’t designing airplanes and spacecraft. Bob Simmons, a Caltech engineering student who moonlighted at Douglas Aircraft during World War II, applied aircraft materials—fiberglass, polyester resins, polystyrene foam—and advanced hydrodynamics to revolutionize surfboard design. A couple decades later, another aerospace engineer, Tom Morey, combined his knowledge of advanced aerospace composites with a quirky sensibility to invent the Boogie Board; another aerospace engineer at the Rand Corporation invented the windsurfer. And so on.

The father of my best childhood friend was an inventor. I never fully understood what that meant, but their garage was awesome.

River Beat: Gray-Lee moves on, Fulp steps in

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Lorri Gray-Lee, who has headed the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office (the folks with that big dam) is heading to the Pacific Northwest, and Terry Fulp, her deputy, is stepping in as acting chief. This is one of the Bureau’s more important jobs, herding the Lower Colorado cats. Not exactly herding, even. Cajoling. Persuading. (This is the office that serves as “watermaster” for distribution of the Lower Basin’s share of Colorado River water.) From the BuRec release:

Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Michael L. Connor has announced that Lorri Gray-Lee will succeed Karl Wirkus as the Pacific Northwest Regional Director when he retires at the end of December. In January, Gray-Lee will move to the Pacific Northwest Region after serving the last four years as the Lower Colorado Region Regional Director….

Terry Fulp will be the acting Regional Director in the Lower Colorado Region beginning in January. Fulp currently serves as the Deputy Regional Director in the Lower Colorado Region.

 

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: renaming the VLA

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VLA

VLA, Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

I am not an expert in branding. So I do not know whether renaming the iconic Very Large Array is a good idea. What I do know is that when the idea was proposed, hilarity ensued. I do know that covering this story will be fun for months to come:

Proposals will be accepted via a website through Dec. 1, and the new name will be announced in January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The search immediately drew jokesters on Twitter, suggesting such names as “iVLA,” “Wicked Large Array” and “Too-Big-To-Fail Array.”

You can add your suggestions here. My favorite additional idea contributed this morning:

A remarkable bit of science policy ignorance

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Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute has clearly not thought terribly hard about the use of science in supporting policy decisions. If he had, he would not have said this (the subject is climate science, but you can substitute anything you want here):

The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Because if he had thought about this, he would have realized that he is arguing here that no science can ever be used in any public policy decision, because, you know, if serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then they can question X, where X is any science at all.

“already contested issues”

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I had occasion this evening to revisit “Sensitivity of Streamflow in the Colorado Basin to Climatic Changes,” by Linda Nash and Peter Gleick, circa 1991:

Water availability, quality, and demand may be affected by higher temperatures, new precipitation patterns, rising sea level, and changes in storm frequency and intensity. Water supply and water management in the Colorado Basin, already contested issues, are likely to be aggravated by these changes.

Of course, as they pointed out in 1993 (and as remains true today), “large uncertainties remain”. But their central point is well taken.