High good, low bad: Mead in July 2010

Photograph: Pete McBride on the parched Colorado River delta, by Jonathan Waterman. Click on the image to be taken to Waterman's Colorado River Project.

During a recent discussion of water at the Aspen Institute’s Environment Forum in Colorado, former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt told a packed house: “The American Southwest is not one of those regions where there is water scarcity. It’s hard to believe, given all the hyping in the national and local and regional press.”

The audience and his copanelists–Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and freshwater fellow for the National Geographic Society, and Pat Mulroy, general manager of Southern Nevada Water Authority (overseeing Las Vegas water)–were taken aback by these statements, writes Jonathan Waterman in the first of a series of Colorado River notes in National Geographic.

Throughout the Southwest, and particularly in a region that I know, the Colorado River Basin, the so called “water buffalos” (those…

High good, low bad: Mead in June 2010

'Colossus' author Michael Hiltzik speculates that Los Angeles Times proprietor Harry Chandler was behind the Hoover administration's hiring of architect Gordon B. Kaufmann to streamline and simplify plans for Boulder (eventually Hoover) Dam. "Early in 1931, Kaufmann began hacking away at Reclamation's architectural scheme (above)," writes Hiltizk, "which was burdened with such neoclassical gingerbread as pediments, elaborate balustrades on the dam crest, and columns capped with bronze eagles." Click on the image to be taken to the Reclamation page about Kaufmann, who also collaborated with the bureau on Parker and Shasta dams.

There is a telling quirk to most US maps of the Colorado River: They stop at the Mexican border. The river’s once-mighty delta and the Sea of Cortez rarely figure.

Save a few forays south, this delineation holds true in the recently published book “Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century“ by Michael Hiltzik. Rather than expand…

High good, low bad: Mead in May 2010

Two graphics from the 2007/2008 Annual Report of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (the most recent available) illustrate how water exports from the San Joaquin and Sacramento River Bay Delta (right) rose sharply as surpluses dried up on the Colorado River (left) after 2002. Click on the image to enlarge the graphics.

Eleven years into a dramatic drought* on the Colorado River, in 2009, the City of Los Angeles finally saw fit to issue a lawn watering ordinance that reduced sprinkler irrigation to a twice weekly schedule. It was an overdue and obvious step given that roughly half of Southern California’s water supply is used out of doors, and half of that is estimated to be wasted through sprinkler run-off and pavement hosing.

That ordinance, which took effect a year ago today, reduced the city’s water consumption to 1991 levels even though the law was widely flouted, most notably by…

High good, low bad: Mead in March 2010

There is a joke that my father, a former aerospace engineer, used to tell that applies equally well to water as to planes. There is a jolt on a jet and the pilot announces that the plane has lost one engine but still has three more. They will be a half an hour late landing. Soon, there is a second jolt and the pilot announces that another engine has failed, but they still have two engines and will be an hour late landing. After a third jolt brings the announcement that they still have one engine and will be an hour and a half late landing, an engineer from the cabin cries, “If the fourth engine goes, we’ll be up here all night!”

Water wise, in spite of a mild El Nino winter, it looks like the West may be up here all night. The level of Lake Mead, the major…

Westlands

AS STAGE armies work Sacramento for their pieces of a proposed $9 plus billion water bill and bond, attorney Lloyd G. Carter would have us wipe some tears from our eyes about the plight of Westlands Water District.

Carter, a former UPI and Fresno Bee reporter, now a deputy in the California Attorney General’s office, has a new article on the subject in the Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal.

He writes of Westlands in Reaping Riches from a Wretched Region: “federal irrigation and farm-subsidy policy in the San Luis Unit since the 1960s has exacerbated grinding poverty while enriching a few dozen of the factory farming dynasties to the detriment of the environment, the human population of the region, small growers, and the public fisc. There are few farms under 500 acres. Rule is by the rich. Indeed, in Westlands, which is a public agency, the growers with the most land have the most votes in electing directors…

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