Chance of Rain

Los Angeles built into a corner

EmilyGreen — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:25:56 +0000

The dams and debris basins strung along the San Gabriel foothills, forming what Flood Control historian Jared Orsi describes as a "Maginot line" around the LA basin, are choked with mountain sediment. A 15-month review of what to do with it is online at the LA Department of Public Works. Until January 2011, a favored option was felling pristine oak woodland, called only "native vegetation" by Flood Control engineers, for conversion to dumps. Public comment on other options for disposal of the sediment is due by May 30th. Click on the map to be taken to the LA County Department of Public Works' draft sediment management 20 year strategic plan.

The list price was $1.125 million in August 2011, when Sotheby’s International Realty held the first open house for 1674 Highland Oaks Drive, in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. Scented candles burned, classical music…

The common purse: Las Posas / Cadiz

EmilyGreen — Sat, 12 May 2012 07:09:40 +0000

A previous post, Rancho Santa Margarita, Meet Calleguas, hit a hornet’s nest. The decision to write it was little more than an instinct. “Poke there.” The post referred to something called the “Las Posas Basin Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project,” described by the Los Angeles Times during the project’s inception in the 1990s as “the largest reservoir in Ventura County, ensuring a reliable water supply in cities from Simi Valley to Oxnard in the event of drought or earthquake.”

Las Posas wasn’t big. It was bigger. “The $47-million project near Moorpark will hold more water than Lake Casitas and nearly four times what Lake Piru holds,” reported the Times.

Until it didn’t. When last month the Ventura County Reporter recounted that the capacity proved to not be the much-celebrated 300,000 acre feet, but instead 50,000 acre feet, no villain was named. Who needs a villain…

Rancho Santa Margarita, meet Calleguas

EmilyGreen — Wed, 09 May 2012 03:31:40 +0000

UPDATED 5/11/2012: As the board of the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District wades through the Draft Environmental Impact Report produced for them by their partners at Cadiz, Inc in the bid to involve the Orange County municipal water company in a water mining scheme in the Mojave Desert, let us pause to look at some bona fides of a lead Cadiz consultant. Cadiz engineer Terry Foreman would have Rancho Santa Margarita believe that “using 50,000 acre-feet per year is optimal for conservation” from a basin with recharge that is perhaps one tenth of that, and that mining groundwater poses “no long-term impacts to the desert environment.”

Believe that and you’ll believe in chocolate cake diets, so it seems unlikely that anyone involved in the project really cares about the Mojave. Yet when it comes to cost, the Rancho Santa…

High good, low bad: Mead in April 2012

EmilyGreen — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:24:32 +0000

In April 2012, Lake Mead fell for the second consecutive month, marking an end to the spoils of the 2010/11 water year and leaving the largest storage reservoir in the West roughly 49 feet from the point where Arizona and Nevada will face shortages.

“American Canopy” on the past of U.S. forests

EmilyGreen — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:34:09 +0000

Eric Rutkow has written a fine history on the rapacious chewing up of American forests and subsequent rise of a faltering culture of forestry management.