Turn off the sprinklers and put down the hose, unless you are fighting a fire
Highlights from March 31, 2009 testimony before the US Congress Natural Resources Committee by US Bureau of Reclamation Acting Commissioner J. William McDonald on Interior’s preparedness plan for dealing with California drought.
FIRE: “The Interior bureaus and our land management partners are preparing to deal with the potential for widespread and intense fires in California this year as a result of multiple successive years of drought.”
NATIONAL PARKS AND CAMPING: “Conservation measures will be put in place in parks where campground water supplies are expected to be limited, including several sites in Yosemite National Park.”
CENTRAL VALLEY: “As of March 30, Central Valley Project agricultural water service contractors north of the Delta will be allocated 5 percent, or 19 thousand acre-feet, of contract water supplies under their CVP contracts. CVP agricultural water service contractors south of the Delta will likely receive no allocation.”
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Why the West Hates Southern California
THE FIRST thing one learns when leaving Los Angeles and California to travel Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona is that the rest of the West hates Californians.
The reason can be summed up in one word: Water.
Legal division of Western water more or less started with the Gold Rush and the first come, first serve law pertaining to gold came to apply to water, no matter how crazy the allocations became as the West was settled.
California was greedy early and has proved positively Roman in its ability to build aqueducts and storage reservoirs. Well endowed with water, it has proved unsurpassed at wasting it, even as the rest of the West shriveled in drought, and even as in the past decade the crisis has reached all three of Southern California’s water sources in the Sacramento Delta, Owens Valley and the Colorado River.
To sum up
Cool, Dry April in West, NOAA reports
May 8, 2009, Asheville, NC — April 2009 rainfall and temperature statistics published by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
Another Reporter Looks at the Bathtub Ring in Lake Mead
For those who think water comes from the faucet, a look, this time in a “Good” blog, at where it comes from before it reaches the spigot.…
Survey Shows Little Media Connection Between Climate Change and Drought
Exloco / Carpe Diem March 2009 Media Survey shows a failure of mainstream media to connect prolonged drought in the West with climate change. Scientists, however, have made the leap. Here is the link to the JPL / Caltech researchers who first alerted Arizona, Nevada and Californian water agencies to a looming crisis on the Colorado river.…
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