The Dry Garden: Grand illusion
In his 1982 autobiography “My Last Breath,” film director Luis Buñuel wrote:
A year can go by, even two, without so much as a single cloud in the impassive sky. Whenever an adventuresome cumulus wandered into view just above the mountain peaks, all the clerks in the grocery next door would rush to our house and clamber up onto the roof. There, from the vantage point of a small gable, they’d spend hours watching the creeping cloud, shaking their heads and murmuring sadly: “Wind’s from the south. It’ll never get here.”
And they were always right.
May a Los Angeles filmmaker one day match the elegance with which the Spanish-born Buñuel exaggerated the dryness of his native Aragon. Annual rainfall there is much like ours: 12 to 15 inches a year.
But when it comes to exaggeration here, our tendency is to overstate the rain. Ever notice how much it …
“There would just be so much litigation”
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is spinning so hard, it may need its own axis. This morning’s Las Vegas Review-Journal captures the angle and motion as the water agency led by Patricia Mulroy moves to defend the lawfulness of a massive haul of groundwater awards put into question last week by the Nevada Supreme Court decision Great Basin Water Network vs State Engineer.
Its defense, hinted at in a January 28 press release from the authority, is to insist that the Supreme Court was wrong to challenge awards that were to flush a nearly 300-mile-long Las Vegas pipeline because violating due process rights of protestors is a common practice of the State Engineer. …
Western datebook: Meet the commissars
STEPPING out of the Kremlin gates tomorrow to give presentations at the G2 Gallery in Venice on their glorious accomplishments will be Jonathan Parfrey, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power board commissioner, and director of LADWP Water Resources Thomas Erb. Some of my best vague acquaintances work for the DWP, but if you think that the Kremlin reference is unfair, try searching Erb’s name on the DWP website and you get exactly one result. For a background article on Parfrey from the LA Times’ best city hall reporter David Zahniser, click here. For a recent story on DWP plans to cover the dry lake bed of Owens Valley with a solar farm, here. To find proof of the department’s much publicized commitment to removing water-hungry and energy-wasting turf, look at the lawn surrounds of its substations. It’s rumored that former general manger David Nahai looks positively …
“At long last, things are getting interesting”
Last updated 2/4/2010, 5.30am PST.
SOME comments deserve to be posts. This is the case of the response today of Eyewitness News investigative reporter George Knapp to Sunday’s feature There will be blood and its account of recent judicial reversals in the plan of the Southern Nevada Water Authority to drive a nearly 300 mile-long pipeline to the feet of the Great Basin National Park in a quest for groundwater for Las Vegas.
Knapp wrote: “… Already, the Nevada Supreme Court’s monumental [January 28] decision is being characterized by SNWA minions as a minor speedbump, a temporary procedural oopsie that will be rectified in a moment or two. It is clearly more than that.”
It clearly is. As Knapp points out, legal remedy for pipeline protestors found wronged in the Nevada Supreme Court decision is likely to be decided by a district judge who in October voided water awards in …
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. …
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