Fasten your seat belt, California
The reported voiding of the Quantification Settlement Agreement today by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Roland Candee has put a concentrated bounce into what Southern Californian water managers have long fashioned as their “hard landing” after they were forced in 2003 by six less well-off states sharing the Colorado River to stop hogging as much as 962,000 acre feet of water above their legal allotment of 4.4 million.
In spite of unfettered urban development across the Colorado River service area in the lead-up to the 2003 cap, Southern California cities managed to reduce their reliance on the river in part by legalizing trades of water from the wildly well endowed agricultural rights holders of the Imperial Irrigation District and neighbors, who had between them 3.850 million acre feet of water. However, evidently not everyone in the Mojave farming community approved of the QSA. Imperial, in a bid to reaffirm its …
Identifying the whatchamacallits
Ah, nature. It’s so full of whatchamacallits.
For many, no labels are necessary when a flower catches the eye or a bird flits overhead. It could be cuckoo or it could be a sparrow. It’s background.
For others, the problem isn’t lack of interest, but memory. By the time most of us are back home flipping through a bird book, our minds will have played tricks with the plumage. He is sure it was an oriole; she is just as sure it was a woodpecker.
Click here to keep reading the LA Times article on new iPhone apps for bird and wildflower lovers.…
Rain likely
The National Weather Service’s prediction for a chance of rain over the weekend in Los Angeles County elevates to “rain likely” for Martin Luther King Day and into the following week. If you haven’t got your wildflower seeds in the ground, the next few days are your window. Over at AccuWeather.com, Ken Clark’s blog sees enough rain coming that he warns people living near recent burn areas to “be ready to evacuate.”
Meanwhile, as the struggle between town planners and developers continues over implementing a Low Impact Development ordinance that would decrease storm water run-off, a community meeting is scheduled for tomorrow at City Hall. Click here for details.…
Haiti
To read the Los Angeles Times report "Haiti is in the grip of unimaginable destruction" click on the image.
At 4:53 p.m. local time on January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Hispaniola Island, just 15 kilometers (10 miles) southwest of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Besides its strong magnitude, the earthquake’s shallow depth of roughly 8.3 kilometers (5.2 miles) ensured that the densely populated capital suffered violent shaking, reports NASA. To keep reading the Earth Observatory report, click here. To learn about American humanitarian relief, click here for the US AID page. For President Obama’s call to the nation to help, click here. To make a Red Cross donation, click here. The minimum donation is $10. If you have an Amazon account, you don’t even need to get out your credit card. The National Groundwater Assn. has a page of organizations dedicated to providing clean water …
The week that was, 1/3-9/2010
Map: US Geological Survey. Source: "Estimated Use of Water in the Tennessee River Watershed in 2000 and Projections of Water Use to 2030." Click on the image to be taken to the article.
“We weren’t very popular during the drought.” — Chuck Bach, general manager for river scheduling for the Tennessee Valley Authority, in the January 5, 2010 Chattanooga Times Free Press article “High-water mark” on how the TVA began 2010 with more water stored in reservoirs above Chattanooga than at the end of any previous year since the authority erected its network of dams in the 1930s and 1940s
…there is a reason the river carries the name “Tennessee.” — Mike Bell, Representative, Tennessee General Assembly, “High-water mark,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, January 5, 2010
“When you hear people say to Georgia, ‘Leave our water alone,’ they need to remember that Georgia already …
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