Cadiz update
The Santa Margarita Water District has announced notice of preparation of a draft Environmental Impact Report of what is now being styled as the “Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project,” a formerly discredited Mojave Desert groundwater mining scheme rejected by the Metropolitan Water District in 2002. Its resurrection, this time with a clutch of small water companies fronting it, has much the same players in the background, not least of them Keith Brackpool, the brazen good time boy of the Manhattan Beach Country Club, horse racing aficionado and close friend/former employer of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. For the history of a plan to extract 50,000 acre feet of water a year from the Mojave Desert and then to use public facilities to wheel the water to public agencies at cost to public lands and public purse, click here.
For the former environmental review, which describes the …
High good, low bad: Mead in February 2011
Actionful and remarkably well-groomed bureaucrats: Bureau of Land Management illustration explaining what might appear a Southern Nevada Water Authority-friendly bent in the framing of the pending Environmental Impact Statement. Click on the image to read the captions.
Two decades ago, a plan to tap the Great Basin Aquifer in five Nevada valleys through a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline to slake inexorably booming Las Vegas was a back-up plan. Plan A was that Nevada’s relatively small allocation from the Colorado River could be increased. Las Vegas is, after all, twenty miles from Lake Mead, the largest storage reservoir in the U.S.
Yet when Western cities kept booming after the Colorado River entered long-term drought in 1991, Plan B became Plan A. Tapping the aquifer of the glorious and sparsely populated counties of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert became a central pillar of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s long term water plan. Steve …
Wet weekend
If you thought that Southern California’s much anticipated snow was the damp squib of the weekend, you didn’t watch the Oscars. More interesting are 2010-11 precipitation numbers to date for what has been a reasonably wet rainy season in Los Angeles County in spite of a La Niña in the equatorial Pacific.
Foothills: Altadena 26.89″ ***, Pasadena: 15.58″ *
San Fernando Valley: Burbank: 14.09″ **
Basin: Downtown Los Angeles: 15.78″ **
Coast: Long Beach: 15.38″ **
If luck amounts to a water plan, then we planned well. To see how a now weakening La Niña has impacted the southern US, from Arizona clear across to Florida, click here for the US Drought Monitor.
*Source: National Weather Service, Los Angeles/Oxnard
**Source: National Weather Service, California Nevada River Forecast Center
***Source: Bill Westphal
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On the public record
Myself I planted native plants because I couldn't afford a sprinkler system when I first moved to Southern California. Then of course I became sanctimonious about it. The bees were pure gravy.
On the public record, the most smartly written blog on California water, responded yesterday to the publication earlier this week of the Public Policy Institute report Managing California Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation, “Reconciliation? Reconciliation of what? Northern and southern Californians? People living in regions that are about to get screwed with their fates? People and the new Californian dream?
Oh. Environmental and Human Water Uses, apparently. That’s a pretty boring thing to reconcile, because what matters in a political system is people’s expectations and their subjective experiences. Do they feel like they’re having their god-given American right to red meat at every meal yanked away from them, or do they feel like they’re planting …
The Dry Garden: Fremont’s flower
Some years ago, the website of Native Sons Nursery had a photograph of a California flannel bush that had been trained to grow along a garden wall. Each bloom in a spangle of flowers was the size of a tea cup. Their yellow could outshine a daffodil, or sunflower. This wasn’t a garden, it was a garden that Matisse dreamed. On seeing that photo, so began years of looking in Los Angeles area gardens for espaliered examples of the glorious genus of natives whose botanical name is Fremontodendron.
And never finding one.
It turns out that the photograph was taken in Guernsey by Native Sons co-founder David Fross, who had just left a place that serves alcohol when he saw the glorious display by one of the signature plants of California chaparral growing in one of the Channel Islands between Britain and France. “I’d had two martinis and half …
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