High good, low bad: Mead in February 2010
Memorial by artist Oskar J.W. Hansen to the men who died in the construction of Hoover Dam. For more on Hansen's work for the dam-building project that made the federal Bureau of Reclamation a defining force in the naturally dry west, click on the image. Photo: Gregvreen's Photostream, Flickr
Between 96 and 112 men died in the construction of Hoover Dam, depending on how you count the deaths (from the time of the dam’s commission in 1922 or from the start of construction in 1931).
Did they die to make the desert bloom, or because the massive federal works project offered jobs job during the Great Depression? Whether they took one for a buck or a bloom, ever since the dam’s completion and the filling of Lake Mead behind it in 1935, the captured water has gone to both desert farming in California and Arizona and a massive Southwestern housing boom.
The upshot has…
High good, low bad: Mead in January 2010
Recent rains throughout the Western states supplied by Lake Mead might give the impression that a more than decade-long drought affecting the Colorado River is over.
The numbers below, along with modeled projections from the federal Bureau of Reclamation for 2010, show just how false those impressions might be.
While 2010 has been declared a normal water delivery year by Reclamation, the “most probable” scenario in its model shows the elevation of the largest reservoir in North America dipping near 1,075 feet next autumn.
Thunk tank
Next Monday, the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Water and Power will be holding a local hearing at the Los Angeles offices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The subject?
“California drought solutions.”
If that seems an odd thing to be contemplating during a deluge, it’s not. Most of our water does not come from local rainfall, but from other places, which, if not in a drought, are definitely in a jam. Last week, that jam became orders of magnitude worse as Sacramento judge Roland Candee struck down something called the Quantification Settlement Agreement.
This 2003 wad of contracts profoundly affects how California may legally divide and manage its share of the Colorado River, which is along with Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in Northern California one of the three main sources of fresh water for Southern California.
Candee’s voiding of the QSA last week is scary…
Salton Sea et al
For those who have asked about the impact of of this week’s ruling by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Roland Candee as it affects the Salton Sea restoration deal incorporated in the 2003 Quantification Settlement Agreement and Joint Powers Authority funding agreement (QSA JPA), here are some relevant excerpts from the decision. Copious numbered references have been struck for coherence and eyeball-busting acronyms have been decoded. The full text of the decision is available here.
These edited excerpts come from Sections 6 through 9, pages 33 through 43 of the decision.
“Dealing with the Salton Sea appears to the Court to have been the single most significant environmental issue faced in the QSA process. The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake, located north of the Mexican border at the northern end of the Imperial Irrigation District service area and the southern end of Coachella Valley Water District’s service area.
“It is in a large…
Fasten your seat belt, California
The reported voiding of the Quantification Settlement Agreement today by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Roland Candee has put a concentrated bounce into what Southern Californian water managers have long fashioned as their “hard landing” after they were forced in 2003 by six less well-off states sharing the Colorado River to stop hogging as much as 962,000 acre feet of water above their legal allotment of 4.4 million.
In spite of unfettered urban development across the Colorado River service area in the lead-up to the 2003 cap, Southern California cities managed to reduce their reliance on the river in part by legalizing trades of water from the wildly well endowed agricultural rights holders of the Imperial Irrigation District and neighbors, who had between them 3.850 million acre feet of water. However, evidently not everyone in the Mojave farming community approved of the QSA. Imperial, in a bid to reaffirm its rights under the QSA,…
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