High good, low bad: Mead in April 2010
Detail from "The Aussie Big Dry: Lessons from Australia for the Colorado River Basin." Source: Brad Udall / CU and NOAA via the Colorado River Commission of Nevada. Click on the image for the entire presentation.
Albuquerque science writer John Fleck spent much of April meandering the Lower Basin of the Colorado River and posting his impressions. The bird-watching was delightful, particularly in Bellagio Fountain and the Las Vegas Wash. But if you read it (definitely read it) please do not be lulled by his couth tone. Fleck, in common with the scientists who he interviews, gathers facts. The implicit assumption behind this approach is that, armed with these facts, we the public will take action, hopefully in the public interest.
(There is an excellent lecture by University of Oregon philosophy professor Kathleen Dean Moore linked on WaterWired about why most of us fail to do this.)
However, even …
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 …
High good, low bad: Mead in February 2010
Memorial by artist Oskar J.W. Hansen to the men who died in the construction of Hoover Dam. For more on Hansen's work for the dam-building project that made the federal Bureau of Reclamation a defining force in the naturally dry west, click on the image. Photo: Gregvreen's Photostream, Flickr
Between 96 and 112 men died in the construction of Hoover Dam, depending on how you count the deaths (from the time of the dam’s commission in 1922 or from the start of construction in 1931).
Did they die to make the desert bloom, or because the massive federal works project offered jobs job during the Great Depression? Whether they took one for a buck or a bloom, ever since the dam’s completion and the filling of Lake Mead behind it in 1935, the captured water has gone to both desert farming in California and Arizona and a massive Southwestern housing …
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. …
Thunk tank
Next Monday, the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Water and Power will be holding a local hearing at the Los Angeles offices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The subject?
“California drought solutions.”
If that seems an odd thing to be contemplating during a deluge, it’s not. Most of our water does not come from local rainfall, but from other places, which, if not in a drought, are definitely in a jam. Last week, that jam became orders of magnitude worse as Sacramento judge Roland Candee struck down something called the Quantification Settlement Agreement.
This 2003 wad of contracts profoundly affects how California may legally divide and manage its share of the Colorado River, which is along with Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in Northern California one of the three main sources of fresh water for Southern California.
Candee’s …
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