The week that was, 2/21-27/2010

Click on the image to be taken to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Tsunami Research to see how models calculate earthquake reverberations in the ocean. The models allow time for evacuation alerts. NBC reported that "tsunami waves began hitting the Hawaiian islands at "exactly the time scientists predicted."

The tsunami raced across the Pacific Ocean at the speed of a jetliner after the quake hit Chile hours earlier. — Quake-triggered tsunami rushes ashore in Hawaii,”  AP / Seattle Times, February 27, 2010*

… the sea level rose almost three feet at Hilo, surging and receding numerous times at intervals of about 20 minutes. — Tsunami waves crossing the Hawaiian Islands,” NBC Hawaii News Now, February 27, 2010. Click here for time-lapse video.

… if one plate dives under the other, which is probably what occurred early Saturday off the coast of Chile, it

The Dry Garden: Protecting the Pacific

What, you might ask, does the ocean have to do with gardening? In California, Orange County landscape designer Douglas Kent would reply: Everything. All the rain that we don’t catch during the winter and all of the irrigation spilled into the streets from our sprinklers in the warm months end up as storm water. “Water running into the ocean is not inherently harmful,” Kent writes in his new book Ocean Friendly Gardens. “It is the stuff attached to it and the stuff it picks up on the way to the ocean that is. Fertilizers, pesticides, oils, cleaning solutions and organic debris all run off a landscape.”

Click here to keep reading about Kent’s new book published by the Surfrider Foundation in the “The Dry Garden” column of the Los Angeles Times

Nevada head of Natural Resources: I am not carrying the water for SNWA

Updated 10.16am 3/1/2010. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the Nevada Legislature will send the proposed water bill to committee before disbanding its special session today. Governor Jim Gibbons may recall legislature for a vote on it once the bill is out of committee.

Governor Jim Gibbons’ instruction to the Nevada legislature to amend state law in a way that would retroactively legalize water awards made since 1947 will not render moot a recent state Supreme Court decision that threatens the future of a controversial Las Vegas pipeline project, a senior state official said today.

Rather, Allen Biaggi, head of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, insisted that the Governor’s instruction has been accompanied by proposed language that excludes from amnesty any awards made to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

However, as pipeline protestors read the same document, they say they are better off staying in the

“A hero named Pat”

One way to write your own history in an heroic guise is to follow suit of the Las Vegas Public Education Foundation’s curiously Soviet tradition of immortalizing city players in children’s books, then placing copies in every public school. Southern Nevada Water Authority general manager Pat Mulroy was the latest in the “hero” series honoring local burghers. Many thanks to the Great Basin Water Network for the alert to this classic of its sort. “A Hero Named Pat” is a first class curiosity, but it is the works of Dr Seuss that are the subject of the upcoming Read Across America Day. For those of you who haven’t registered to take part in the National Education Association’s utterly wonderful event on March 2nd, there is still time to contact your local school and offer to read with a class. Think of the fun. Horton hears a Who! Green Eggs

The screw turns

Updated 10.16am 3/1/2010. The Las Vegas Review-Journal  reports that the Nevada Legislature will send the proposed water bill to committee before disbanding its special session today. Governor Jim Gibbons may recall legislature for a vote on it once the bill is out of committee.

NEVADA Governor Jim Gibbons all but gave back what late last month the state supreme court took away when today he released formal instruction to the state legislature to revise a law “concerning the time in which the State Engineer must act upon a water rights application so that [it] applies retroactively to all applications filed with the State Engineer between July 1, 1947 and July 1, 2003 and so that provisions … apply retroactively to pending applications and applications/permits under appeal involving certain transfers of groundwater.”

The upshot? Fasten your seatbelt for some time travel. Those who protested the nearly 300-mile-long pipeline planned by

keep looking »
  • After the lawn


  • As you were saying: Comments

  • As I was saying: Recent posts

  • Garden blogs


  • Contact

    Emily Green by e-mail at emily.green [at] mac.com
  • Categories