A bad year in the Colorado River Basin – barring a truly miraculous spring, probably the worst in recorded history. It is bad enough so the Bureau may have to stop creating power from the Glen Canyon powerplant by this coming fall. At that point, the only way to get water downriver from Glen Canyon Dam will be dribbling it through four outlet tubes that the Bureau is now wishing it had built differently (better) 65 years ago. And praying for enough precip to push the level back above the danger point for the turbines. Meanwhile the negotiations between the seven basin states about the future distribution of the water remained at an impasse. One might think that a really bad year might generate some new thinking, but the two Basins are still debating Compact numbers like 7.5 million acre-feet for the Lower Basin with a river that might produce less than 5 maf this year, and maybe not much … Read More
Romancing the River: The Era of Conquest Part 2
The hard news about the Colorado River since my last post here is not good; we had a storm that dropped around two feet of snow above the 8,000-foot elevation – well, maybe the 9,000-foot elevation. But that was followed by a couple weeks of ridiculously warm weather for February and early March, with more 50-degree weather forecast into the near future, and overnight lows often in the 20s, rather than down around zero. Forecasts for the runoff this year range around a third of the ‘historic normal,’ which is an increasingly meaningless number – and dangerous too, MAGA-thinking, keeping alive the hope that eventually the Colorado River will be great again if we just wait it out, or close our eyes and wish real hard, with real violence toward realists…. The Bureau bases its ‘averages’ on the recent 30-year average going by decades – so now the ‘long-term average’ is based on 1991-2020. Back as recently as 2019, it … Read More
Romancing the River – The Romance of Conquest, Part 1
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. – Senior advisor to Pres. G. W. Bush, 2004 You’ve seen that quote here before – and you’ll probably see it again; if this were a Wagnerian opera, that line would be a lietmotif, a recurring musical thread associated with a particular character or place or idea in the story being told musically. And who’s to say, ‘The Romance of the Colorado River,’ Frederick Dellenbaugh’s title, might make a grand opera. But before launching into the next chapter in the ‘Romance of the Colorado River,’ there are some items of news to note. The no-news item of course continues to be the ongoing stalemate in the ongoing negotiations between the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins. On the eve of their Valentine’s Day deadline, there is talk of new ‘interim interim guidelines,’ two to five years, for at least a nominal state presence as the Bureau of … Read More
Romancing the River: The Romantic Scientist
There continues to be no new information from the ongoing negotiations among the protagonists for the seven states trying to work out a new two-basin management plan for the Colorado River. The Bureau of Reclamation, however, is pressing ahead; it recently went public with its ‘Draft Environmental Impact Statement’ (DEIS) for ‘Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.’ The five alternative ‘operational guidelines and strategies’ analyzed in this DEIS were announced back in the fall of 2024; the Bureau has spent the past year-plus examining their environmental impacts. I’m not going to go into their analyses right now; I’m still working on skimming, skipping, sprinting and plowing my way through enough of the 1600 pages or so of the report to feel reasonably informed on its contents. But I will note that the first action analyzed (skipping past the mandatory ‘No Action’ alternative) is for the Bureau to go ahead and run the river system as … Read More