We will not be having a White Christmas this year in Albuquerque

Posted by on

The notion of a White Christmas is at best an inventive fiction, at worst a lie. Jody Rosen, in the wonderful book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, put it thus:

The longing for Christmas snowfall, now keenly felt everywhere from New Hampshire to New Guinea, seems to have originated with Berlin’s song.

Albuquerque’s weather nerds have been playing the “consecutive days without measurable precipitation” game with increasing gusto in recent weeks. It’s up to 79 this morning, this Christmas Eve, which earned it a spot in the top ten such streaks since settler culture brought its particular empirical approach to keeping weather records to this land in the 1890s.

Whether this particular tool kit – a big funnel-like device out at the airport that captures and calculates bulk properties of the drops of rain or flakes of snow that fall upon it – is the best way to understand our current predicament is questionable. But the tools we use to understand our world bias that understanding in unknowable ways, and it’s the tool I know, so every morning I check the length of the streak and tweet.

Washington, D.C. Greyhound bus terminal on the day before Christmas, 1941. John Vachon, FSA/Office of War Information

During my newspaper career, I invented an Albuquerque Journal tradition of the White Christmas story and stuck to it, year after year, because editors are always antsy at this time of year. Antsy editors, in need of copy to fill newspapers, are an opportunity not to be missed.

One of my journalism tricks, in general, was to plant my story in familiar ground, starting with things I imagined readers knew and then lead them from there to new places. And there are few bits of ground as familiar to the American ear than Irving Berlin’s White Christmas:

The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, LA
But it’s December the 24th
And I’m longing to be up north

Wait, what?

The canonical version, the hit sung by Bing Crosby and released in 1942 during the terrifying first year of American involvement in that war, leaves out that first verse. In so doing it leaves aside the tension of a complicated nation with oranges and palm trees and a culture drifted apart from an imagined and, as Rosen argues, never-quite-real past of sleighs and such on a Connecticut farm at Christmas.

But the first verse is always what has charmed me, a life-long resident of the nation’s arid southwestern corner. And so, insulated by reservoir storage, aquifers, and plumbing from any real discomfort associated with 79 days and counting without any rain or snow, I can play the White Christmas game.

Acting like the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan is Done

Posted by on

Boulder Harbor, Lake Mead, December 2017

LAS VEGAS, NV – When I stopped at Boulder Harbor on Lake Mead Tuesday morning as I drove into Las Vegas, I saw this field of salt cedar taking hold on what had been a mud flat left by Mead’s declining water levels. It’s a clumsy metaphor for what happens when you get comfortable with the levels of a 39 percent full/61 percent empty reservoir.

At this morning’s Colorado River Water Users Association plenary panel, five of the basin’s water management leaders spoke up about the status of the Drought Contingency Plan, the mystical “DCP”. A year ago at this meeting, the DCP seemed close, maybe (I boldly and perhaps naively argued) inevitable. The basic terms – specified water use cutbacks by Nevada, Arizona, and California as Lake Mead drops – have been in place for two years, now it’s just arguing over implementation details.

This year new problems have set in that, the morning panelists made clear, are making this seem harder, not easier. Chief among them is the struggle to get consensus within Arizona about how to accommodate shortfalls on the river, and seems to be getting harder, not easier. “Our challenge is growing, not contracting,” Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said.

With Arizona an obvious holdout, California has taken a bit of a breather as well, to work out issues involving the Salton Sea, the Sacramento Bay-Delta, and the complicated relationship between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Imperial Irrigation District. Met and IID say they are very close, so it seems like once Arizona sorts out its mess, California will be quick to finalize as well.

But that leaves the thorny question of federal legislation. It’s arcane, but there’s a belief among most of the basin states and the federal government that a legislative fix is needed to make DCP work, involving Interior’s authority to manage releases from Lake Mead during drought conditions. And OMG Congress, who wants to ask them to do an important thing right now? And if we do, should we tack on some other things that some of us have wanted to do Congressionally as well, as long as we’ve cracked open that pop-top?

But here’s the thing. Even though we don’t have DCP done, all the basin users are acting, operationally, like it’s a done deal. The states of the Lower Basin are leaving significant quantities of water in Lake Mead this year, kinda like if DCP was already in place. And, crucially, Nevada and Southern California seem to be presuming, in leaving that water in the lake, that the new rules for taking it out under drought conditions, embodied in DCP, will be in effect when they’re needed. Absent DCP, this would pose significant risk for them that they might not be able to get their water out of Lake Mead. This is a strong vote of confidence that DCP, while not done, soon will be.

Those salt cedars growing on Boulder Harbor’s mud flats are operating under the presumption that Lake Mead’s levels are stabilizing. Maybe it’s a vote of confidence in the DCP.

Lake Mead: 61 percent empty or 39 percent full?

Posted by on

LAS VEGAS, NV – “Dry for Decades,” the tourist placard at Hoover Dam’s Nevada spillway says. “The last time the waters of the Colorado River flowed through this spillway was in 1983.”

On my way to this year’s annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, I spent some time yesterday at Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, the great reservoir that stores water for Las Vegas, central Arizona, Southern California, and Mexico.

The reservoir was at elevation 1,081.5 feet above sea level, which in another time would have set off alarm bells in the water management community. But in the years since 2010, when Mead first dropped into alarm bell territory, the sound of the warnings has become muted. In 2010, Mead in the low 1,080’s felt dire. But in the years since, for better or worse, the river management community has become accustomed to operating under the constraints of low reservoirs.

Colorado River water use, data USBR, graph by John Fleck, University of New Mexico Water Resources Program

The “for better” part of this is the increasingly sophisticated operations skill set, the juggling of levels between the various reservoirs on the Colorado River to keep the system operating, and the remarkable conservation success, especially in the Lower Basin, that has stabilized Mead’s levels in the 1,070’s to 1,080’s, at least for now. The latter is remarkable. Lower Basin use of Colorado River water – in Arizona, Nevada, and California – is on track to end the calendar year at 6.7 million acre feet, its lowest since 1986.

The “for worse” part of becoming accustomed to Lake Mead’s bathtub ring and the math that goes with it is the waning sense of urgency.

Policy happens in the hallways at CRWUA, which in this case was a striking conversation outside the elevators last night at Caesar’s Palace as a clog of basin water managers formed on their way to dinner, blocking the hallway so that every new water manager who walked past had no choice but to stop and join the conversation. I’m not a journalist any more, so I’ll happily leave the details unsaid – folks need space to work this stuff out, and I’m confident that they’re trying. But in general, the conversation included two key elements. The first was an enumeration of the various stumbling blocks in the way of a new Drought Contingency Plan, the almost-but-not-quite-done scheme to rejigger Colorado River water allocation and management in times of shortage. The basic terms of the deal have been set for two years, but there are a lot of niggling details.

Folks were very close a year ago at CRWUA to signing the deal. But then we had a reasonably wet winter, the big reservoirs rose a bit, and the pressure was off.

In the classic Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, the political scientist John Kingdon describes how policy entrepreneurs work and refine their ideas, awaiting the convergence of problems and politics to open a window of opportunity. One example of how that might happen is when the problem gets bad enough – say, for example, a plummeting reservoir – that the issue rises onto the action agenda.

So it is not surprising that one of the questions that came up in the Caesar’s Palace hallway, outside the Palace Tower elevators, was the question of what would happen if we had a bad snowpack this winter. At that point, a Kingdon-style “policy window” will likely open. You could think of CRWUA as a gathering of the policy entrepreneurs, preparing for that moment.

Lake Mead is currently 39 percent full (or 61 percent empty, as one wag said in reply when I tweeted about this yesterday). Interesting to ponder what the trigger point is for action.

More on the literary heritage of Santa Ana winds, and fire

Posted by on

Laura Bliss turned to Joan Didion today to help make sense of Santa Anas, and fires, in our beloved Southern California:

For all the praise of its “perfect weather,” L.A. is often seen as a city created in defiance of the laws of nature. Before flooded Houston acquired a similar reputation, critics argued that parched, hilly, quake-prone Los Angeles should never have been built where it is: The land is too dry, the earth too unstable. In pop culture, the hubris of its existence brings spectacular punishment—witness L.A. split open by earthquakes, destroyed in alien attacks, consumed by fire. Dubbed the “Devil Winds” in legend and literature, the Santa Ana is an old fixture of this trope, mythicized as a force of insanity, murder,and suicide. “The violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability,” Joan Didion wrote in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Writing for the Atlantic’s CityLab, Bliss talks of viewpoints, and lessons:

For those in East Coast cities in particular, perhaps, it will stir up a certain moralism about where cities should and should not be—reminiscent, perhaps, of how hurricane damage was often characterized as karma for overdevelopment in Florida and Texas. Why were people living there to begin with?

Undoubtedly, California’s fires have lessons for urban planners: Some of the foothill communities burning this week have recently developed further into the wild-land interface, inserting homes into fire-prone areas. Zoning and other land-use policies may need to be reexamined, among other ways leaders must prepare for and mitigate the effects of an always-burning future, as the warming atmosphere fans Santa Ana flames.

And Faith Kearns, with Didion as well, in a smart take on how this year’s California fires are undermining our sense that we’re in charge:

There is no doubt that this disaster has deeply tested our assumptions about how we live with wildfires, notably the idea that we can control them. From Houston to Puerto Rico to here at home in California, disasters are revealing new ground that is paradoxically both shakier and more solid than it once seemed. We may find our footing by finally embracing the fact that we can’t always be in charge.

And this, which it took a bit for me to dredge from distant memory. It’s from John Rechy’s L.A. novel Bodies and Souls, in which the Santa Anas and their fires were a sort of central character:

John Rechy, Bodies and Souls, 1984

Some thoughts on disaster journalism, fire, Southern California, and resilience

Posted by on

Fire Heads For Valley

This conversation triggered by Faith Kearns’ comments about memories of Santa Anas got me thinking about an old piece I wrote a while back and never published. I didn’t publish it because the editor I was pitching didn’t want it, but in retrospect I’m glad it never ran. It seemed ill-timed then, and on a morning when we’re glued to our screens watching fire in the Southern California of my childhood, it makes a point that’s as ill-timed today, but that needs to be made. So here goes, with some tweaks to bring it up to date….

One of the problems in the perception disaster journalism gives us of disasters is the narrowness or broadness of the lens with which we view things. We see the fire, but not the not fire. This biases our understanding.

The news across the Southern California of my childhood was stark in the last days of September 1970. A fire that had ignited in Lytle Creek Canyon, in the mountains north of what is now Rancho Cucamonga, was growing. Forecasters were predicting fierce Santa Ana winds.

Living in Upland, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Lytle Creek fire was our fire. I know now that there were many fires burning in those apocalyptic weeks across Southern California, but from the vantage point of our childhood, there was only this one. Chaffey College, where my father taught art, was in its path. As the winds kicked up the afternoon of Oct. 1 and fanned the flames, school disbanded early. My friends and I walked the few blocks home from our sixth grade classroom at Valencia Elementary School under a sky that seemed ablaze, the sun red-orange color through smoke fanned toward us by the hot dry winds.

Dad’s school evacuated too, and my sister, Lisa, and I remember packing the car to evacuate. Dad and I climbed onto the roof to wet down our wood shingles as we watched the fire burn through the afternoon and into the evening across the hillsides above our suburban corner of paradise, watching the chaparral that was our childhood playground go up in flames.

Lytle Creek was our fire, but of course it was not the not only one. By one count 773 wildfires burned across Southern California in those remarkable two weeks from late September through early October 1970. According to a history by emergency manager Dale Rowley nearly 600,000 acres – more than 900 square miles – burned, destroying 722 homes and killing 16 people.

Rainfall the previous six months had been the second lowest on record across Southern California. The arrival of the Santa Ana winds, a hot bolt out of the desert, gave life to one of Joan Didion’s most famous descriptions of life in Southern California. “[T]he violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability,” Didion wrote in 1968. “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

The last few years in Southern California have been like that. Last year the Blue Cut Fire again burned again through Lytle Creek, and this morning we watched our screens spellbound as the Skirball Fire tour down the 405 and into Bel-Air, burning the jockeys off of rich people’s lawns, to borrow the memorable words of Frank Zappa. We are reminded of Didion’s powerful description of Southern California’s fragility. But is “fragility” the right way to think about this?

Drawing on the work of ecologists, scholars who study “resilience” look to the ability of a human community to absorb a shock and retain its basic structure and function. By that measure, in the nearly five decades since Didion wrote those words, Southern California has demonstrated that it is anything but fragile. Fires, fueled by drought and a warming climate, have beaten us at our margins again and again. They will ever do so, because we have built cities in Southern California and across the West is places prone to fire, extending ourselves into the inevitable wildland urban interface.

But the city I grew up in, Upland, ever threatened by fire at its margins, has retained its basic structure and function, has thrived as a human community in the decades since the Lytle Creek fire. It is a story repeated across Southern California. Even as fire batters us, Southern California has retained its basic structure and function in the decades since dad and I sat on the roof hosing down the shingles and watching the hillside above our house burn. Disaster journalism shows us those burning margins, as it should, and life there is terrifying. But they are only the margins.

This is not to minimize the suffering of communities and ecosystems hit by wildfire. But we should not extend our fear from stark headlines and smoke on the horizon to a broader fear that Southern California as a whole is, as Didion wrote, “close to the edge.”

“do not bombard people with evidence”

Posted by on

Students in next semester’s University of New Mexico Water Resources Program core curriculum will be reading this new paper by Paul Cairney and Richard Kwiatkowski:

To communicate effectively in policymaking systems, actors need to understand how policymakers process evidence and the environment in which they operate. Therefore, we combine psychology and policy studies to produce a three-step strategy. First, do not bombard people with evidence. Human beings have too much information to process, and they use heuristics to filter information to make decisions quickly. Synthesise and frame evidence to help you tailor it to the ways in which policymakers demand and understand information. Second, find the right time to act. Timing matters during key individuals’ patterns of thinking and the alignment of conditions in political systems. Third, engage with real world policymaking rather than waiting for a ‘rational’ and orderly process to appear. To present evidence during mythical stages of a ‘policy cycle’ is misguided, and to ‘speak truth to power’ without establishing legitimacy and building trust may be counterproductive. Our overall message is pragmatic, not Machiavellian: effective communication requires the suppliers of evidence to see the world from the perspective of their audience and understand the policy process in which they engage.

The course’s primary goal is to teach the students basic systems modeling techniques, both hydrologic and economic – linked. But I’m adamant that our students understand that their technical work is intrinsically part of a political and policy ecosystem – that there is no technical work on its own, unencumbered by the messy world of how humans actually use it.

We’ll be modeling the Gila River in New Mexico, which right now is about as messy a political and policy ecosystem as a body of technical work can encounter.

Taking applications for fall 2018 if you want to join us!

stormwater is not wasted water

Posted by on
Albuquerque sewage treatment plant outfall

Albuquerque sewage treatment plant outfall, one of the largest tributaries to the Rio Grande

When we talk about capturing “wasted” water for use – stormwater, sewage treatment plant effluent – it’s important to think about where that water is going now, before we start capturing it.

Often, it’s into a river. So capturing it and putting it to use for some human purpose is depriving the river of that water.

Here’s Matt Weiser on the Los Angeles River example:

A new report from the University of California, Los Angeles Grand Challenges program puts the conflict in stark terms: if all the currently envisaged stormwater capture and groundwater recharge projects go ahead, the L.A. river will be completely dried up, leaving no water for wildlife and recreation.

As Matt’s story points out, this doesn’t mean don’t do it. It just means being mindful of the tradeoffs.

Ghost Motel

Posted by on

Homeless campers at the site of the old Zia Motor Lodge, Central Avenue (Route 66) in Albuquerque

One of my many book ideas is The Decline of a Good American City, a loving but sad tribute to Albuquerque. I’m not sure if the premise is right, and I’m not sure if a not-optimistic framing is of any use whatsoever, whether it’s right or not. So I’ll probably never write this, but I was thinking about it on my morning bike ride.

 

 

the abundance and diversity of water birds in Phoenix

Posted by on

My “natural” versus “not natural” categorization sometimes blinds me to the ways of urban nature:

The development of Phoenix has, perhaps counter-intuitively, increased the total water permanence throughout the city when compared to the surrounding desert. This helps explain how Phoenix’s discrete blue spaces are able to subsidize such high levels of waterbird diversity and abundance. As long as the local habitat feature has the characteristics needed to support the community, features of the surrounding urban matrix are relatively unimportant.

That’s from “Waterbird community composition, abundance, and diversity along an urban gradient” by Andrade and colleagues in the latest issue of Landscape and Urban Planning. They surveyed birds in Phoenix, drawn by the water laid out upon the land. Birds are no dummies – where there’s water in the desert, they congregate.