High good, low bad: Mead in January 2012
Notes about Colorado River snowpack in January 2012, Lake Mead and public comment on the DEIR being circulated on the Cadiz Valley groundwater mining project.Commenting on the unspeakable
Five years ago, when asked about a plan by Las Vegas to pump groundwater around the Great Basin National Park, Nevadan hydrologists who learned that I was a reporter based in Southern California used to respond, “If you think that’s bad, you should look at Cadiz.”
Nevadans live to insult Californians, but it was said so many times by so many hydrologists that roughly two-and-a-half years ago, I started looking at this worse-than-Vegas Cadiz.
It wasn’t the Spanish port, but a little-known unincorporated pocket of the Californian Mojave just visible in the upper right hand corner of this lovely old map. Thanks to a water project backed by some of the golden state’s leading politicians, even five years ago Cadiz had another meaning. It was hydrology shorthand for “water grab.”
As I began studying it, incredulous dispatches on Cadiz became an early and running theme in this blog. We …
Elden Hughes and Cadiz
If it were possible to raise Elden Hughes from the dead, the release today of the draft environmental impact report on the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project would do it. A recipient of the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award for his work protecting California deserts, Hughes — who died on Sunday in Joshua Tree — was an integral part of the drive that in 2002 temporarily defeated a scheme by Cadiz, Inc to mine an ancient reserve of groundwater near the Mojave National Preserve.
For background on the Cadiz project, click here. To hear Hughes on KPCC’s Larry Mantle Show after the Cadiz project was revived in 2009, here. Do, while reading, be sure to click here for a fine obituary on Hughes by the LA Times’s Louis Sahagun.…
Cadiz update
The Santa Margarita Water District has announced notice of preparation of a draft Environmental Impact Report of what is now being styled as the “Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project,” a formerly discredited Mojave Desert groundwater mining scheme rejected by the Metropolitan Water District in 2002. Its resurrection, this time with a clutch of small water companies fronting it, has much the same players in the background, not least of them Keith Brackpool, the brazen good time boy of the Manhattan Beach Country Club, horse racing aficionado and close friend/former employer of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. For the history of a plan to extract 50,000 acre feet of water a year from the Mojave Desert and then to use public facilities to wheel the water to public agencies at cost to public lands and public purse, click here.
For the former environmental review, which describes the …
Betting man seeks angles
It’s unclear to seasoned observers whether the speculators behind Cadiz Inc, a company pushing an outlandish plan to tap desert groundwater for Southern California cities, plan to go for actual water, or are content to capitalize on the stock market on the sheer prospect of mining it. Cadiz founder Keith Brackpool likes to play all the angles.
To appreciate just how many angles, check out Capitol Weekly’s report today on a Brackpool-backed bill in the California legislature seeking to change rules as to how one can wager on horse-racing.
“One key component added to the bill is exchange betting,” reports the Weekly. “This is a type of betting that allows players to essentially bet against a horse, or bet that a horse will finish in a particular spot in a race, or take innumerable other possible positions. Unlike traditional betting, where the track provides odds on particular horses, …
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
