Question time for Cadiz
IN 1998, the private water speculator Cadiz, Inc began selling the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California on the idea of a groundwater project in the Mojave Desert. As enthusiasm for it grew, by November 1999, the US Bureau of Land Management and Metropolitan had produced a draft environmental impact statement as to what they imagined that the Cadiz project would entail, its risks, its benefits and its costs.
For the next two years, hydrologists and geologists from the US National Park Service, the US Geological Survey and San Bernardino County vetted the claims of the draft EIS and returned their comments.
In September 2001, a final Environmental Impact Statement was published. The collective commentary was so withering and the risks revealed by independent scrutiny so overwhelming that in 2002 the Metropolitan board voted to abandon the project.
Internet searches for the …
How it’s done in the desert
A REMORSELESS game of political chess being played out by the two driest states in the country moved inexorably toward checkmate last week in Washington DC.
Mount Wheeler, the peak whose snowmelt feeds this stream in the Great Basin Desert, stands in Nevada. But Wheeler’s water serves Snake Valley, which straddles the Nevada-Utah border.
Congressional maneuvering over which state has the rights to how much of Mt Wheeler’s water began in 2004, when in a land bill pushed by the Nevada delegation, Congress granted right of way for a Las Vegas pipeline that would eventually run hundreds of miles into the Great Basin to tap Snake Valley.
But hours before the vote, Utah Senator Bob Bennett slipped a clause into the bill dictating that no water could be taken from border valleys without Utah’s consent.
As negotiations took …
Makes sense to them
THE EDITORIAL board of the Las Vegas Sun knows a scientific result when it suits the board’s purposes. According to the board, climate modeling out of the University of Colorado showing the potential of the main storage reservoirs on the Colorado River to go dry by mid-century is all the more reason that the Southern Nevada Water Authority should run a pipeline 300 miles north to the foot of the Great Basin National Park and pump its groundwater south to Las Vegas.…
Capturing rain (and run-off) in the Inland Empire
TO LOS ANGELES, rainfall is storm water and is flushed out to sea. For the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, rainwater and stormwater is water, best treated and saved. For a first class report in the Los Angeles Times by Bettina Boxall, click on the desalting plant.…
Bundanoon bottle ban began down under
THE TOWN of Bundanoon in New South Wales, Australia, became an accidental champion in the crusade against bottled water last week, suggested the New York Times on Thursday. As the Times has it, Bundanoon’s rejection of bottled water began with a bid by a bottling company to tap the local aquifer. From the story:
According to Huw Kingston, the owner of Ye Olde Bicycle Shoppe and a leader of the ‘Bundy on Tap’ campaign, the ban did not begin as an environmental crusade. It started when a bottling company sought permission to extract millions of liters of water from the local aquifer.
At first, residents were upset at the prospect of tanker trucks rumbling through their quiet streets. But as opposition grew, Mr. Kingston said many residents began to question the idea of trucking water about 100 miles north to a bottling plant in Sydney, only to transport it …
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