Debris warning for burn areas
THE US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY today issued winter rain debris-flow warnings for communities at the feet of the San Gabriel Mountains, as well as areas in Big Tujunga Canyon, Pacoima Canyon, Arroyo Seco, West Fork of the San Gabriel River, and Devils Canyon.
For the USGS press release along with further links for landslide preparedness and weather warning systems, click here; for text of the USGS hazard assessment, click here; for the Los Angeles Times report, click here. To enlarge the map, click on the image.
Over at LA Observed, Kevin Roderick harks back to John McPhee’s account of “rock porridge” via a Bernadette Murphy op-ed piece in the LA Times.
If it’s any comfort to those downhill from potential torrents of debris, predictions of an El Nino for Southern California look about as promising for rainfall as another supposed El Nino year, 2006-2007, a record low …
She says Mulroy, Reisner said Mulwray
Patricia Mulroy. Photo: Sam Morris / Las Vegas Sun. Click on the image to be taken to Morris's portrait.
WHEN Marc Reisner updated his landmark book Cadillac Desert in 1992, he mistakenly referred to the “forceful woman” who heads the Las Vegas-based Southern Nevada Water Authority as Patricia Mulwray. Her name is actually Patricia Mulroy.
Reisner’s mistake might have been a Freudian slip: Hollis Mulwray is a character in the movie Chinatown who is based on William Mulholland, the powerful founder of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
To keep reading Matt Jenkins’ update in the High Country News on Patricia Mulroy’s plan to siphon the water from the foot of the Great Basin National Park to Las Vegas, click here.…
The Dry Garden: Carol’s list
AT A packed hall of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden last week, horticulturist Carol Bornstein was asked by assembled Southern Californian park keepers how native plants would do in landscapes irrigated by reclaimed water.
To read what the author of “California Native Plants for the Garden” advised in this week’s Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times, click here.
For information on how to attend Bornstein’s presentation on the sensory impact of native plants this Thursday night (October 8th) at the Southern California Horticultural Society meeting, click here and here for her October 15th talk on the same subject at the Solvang public library.…
This is not a spider
Its legs are too long. It's a Model Cave Harvestman, or very rare daddy long legs, which is unique to the Great Basin National Park, where discoveries of new life-forms could stand in the way of a controversial groundwater pumping plan by Las Vegas. Photo: John Locher / Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click on the Harvestman to be taken to more photos by Locher and to read about an underground tour of Nevada's only national park by environment reporter Henry Brean in Sunday's Review-Journal. Thanks to John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal and jfleck at inkstain for catching this deliciously creepy and wondrous story out of Las Vegas.
The Los Angeles Aqueduct, explained
North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
