How Atlantis disappeared
Posted on | October 9, 2009 | No Comments
“How Atlantis disappeared” by Amy Scattergood
Have a nice day, Governor Schwarzenegger
Posted on | October 9, 2009 | No Comments
Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakfast, via Twitter. His previous twitter from last night: "Water is biggest crisis facing CA. 40% unemplymt in Cent Val. Delta close to collapse. Leg must deliver water Friday or see lots of vetoes." Click on the smiley face if you can stomach more.
ONE month ago, the Sacramento Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Contra Costa Times, Capitol Weekly, Aquafornia, this website and others followed the California legislature down to the last weary minutes of regular session (intro here, news roll here, conclusion here). For the first time in a quarter of a century, there was a slim chance that a package of water bills aimed at securing the future of safe water supplies from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta might pass.
They didn’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened legislature that unless Delta bills contained $5bn worth of infrastructure goodies favored by the governor, he would veto them. No water legislation left the assembly and senate.
In a reprise of that failure, Schwarzenegger has demanded water bills to his desk by the end of business today or threatened to veto more than 700 other unrelated bills actually passed by the legislature.
One month ago, we watched. Today, with sympathy to the hostage legislation, my plan is to do much needed clean up in the garden. Aquafornia has today’s countdown plus a heartening item from On the public record assuring us that “the machinery for what the big water bills would do is already churning.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times editorial pages carry an op-ed urging Mayor Villaraigosa to stop playing politics with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and to appoint someone who actually knows how to run a utility.
Click here for a link to today’s water op-ed in the LA Times
“The governor should back off”
Posted on | October 8, 2009 | No Comments
Photo: NASA Earth Observatory
WHILE the post-Zell Los Angeles Times news side has had only spotty coverage of the most important water legislation in a quarter of a century moving through the state legislature this year, the paper’s editorial pages have followed it diligently. (For an account of rolling news coverage across the press, click here).
The subject at the heart of the legislation is the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, source of water for two out of three Californians and the largest estuary on the Pacific coast of North America.
Today’s editorial in the Times gives credit to the much maligned legislature and looks at arguments over how to pay for an estimated $12bn worth of water infrastructure upgrades.
Their bottom line: “The governor should back off and allow lawmakers the additional week or two to craft a package that will work.” To read it, click here.
Over in the San Francisco Chronicle editorial pages, the impression is much the same. “Governor, you’re making yourself look petty, petulant, even irrelevant. It’s time to drop the veiled threat to veto the 700 bills on your desk unless legislators meet your midnight Friday deadline to upgrade the state’s water system.”
George Skelton disagrees. Click here to find out why and for a look at where Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been (or, more aptly, hasn’t been) on Bay Delta reform.
Fuzzy lines and phantasmagorias
Posted on | October 7, 2009 | 4 Comments
DOES Matt Damon’s H2O Africa help water management in developing countries? Todd Jarvis, Associate Director of the Institute for Water and Watersheds at Oregon State University, has doubts. “I just wonder how many of his movie dollars are going to go to solving water problems, and how much is going to get soaked up by corruption.”
WaterWired has Jarvis’s autumn lecture on water and ethics,”Fuzzy lines and phantasmagorias,” posted. To access it, click here. Jarvis’s message to up and coming hydro-geologists: “I have been unethical. Everyone is unethical sometimes … As a professional, you will be on that line. You will walk that line many times.”
Citing the World Bank, he said that while Scandinavia leads the world in non-corrupt practices, the US is “not too far away from Italy with respect to corruption.” This offered a natural segue to look at the $500 billion expected to flow in stimulus money for US water infrastructure repair. “Let’s say the corruption is only one per cent. Is that pocket change?”
Over in the Los Angeles Times this morning, two Sacramento reporters write that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been holding the legislature hostage with threats of mass vetos unless he gets water bills to his desk addressing problems facing the troubled Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. This is a not-so-recent double down on a previous threat that he would veto any water bills without billions of dollars worth of pet dam projects. Will he get the bills? A better question might be: Does he really want them? What better way to force the federal government to intervene than to prove California incapable of governing itself?
Is holding 700 unrelated bills and the future of the state’s water supply hostage for a pet infrastructure project ethical? Can the World Bank and Oregon State University’s Todd Jarvis possibly be right? Are we really as incorruptible as Italy?
Debris warning for burn areas
Posted on | October 6, 2009 | 3 Comments
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 rainfall year.
This post has been updated.
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