Los Alamos legacy
FRANK CLIFFORD, author of “The Backbone of the World,” long-time staff environment editor of the Los Angeles Times and now a freelance writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, reports in today’s Los Angeles Times on a threat from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Rio Grande. From the story:
Isolated on a high plateau, the Los Alamos National Laboratory seemed an ideal place to store a bomb factory’s deadly debris. But the heavily fractured mountains haven’t contained the waste, some of which has trickled down hundreds of feet to the edge of the Rio Grande, one of the most important water sources in the Southwest. Click here to keep reading.…
High good, low bad: Mead in October
Source: University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Digital Collections.
WHEN the Colorado River’s water was divided by treaty in the 1920s, Nevadan negotiators never imagined that Las Vegas would need more than 300,000 acre feet of water a year (compared to Arizona’s 2.8m and California’s 4.4m). The population of Clark County was roughly 2,500. Its largest city, Las Vegas, a railroad town, already had groundwater and native springs, if not the semitropical climate promised in this Chamber of Commerce brochure, date unknown.
The once ebullient springs of Las Vegas are now dry, Clark County is 90% dependent on that 300,000 acre feet of water from Lake Mead, the reservoir containing Colorado River water impounded behind Hoover Dam. The population of greater Las Vegas is roughly two million and cities such as San Diego, Phoenix and Los Angeles also vie for water from water in Lake Mead.
Meanwhile, Mead is shrinking. …
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