(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report-March-7%2C-2024.pdf
A Note to Readers
The cover photo above focuses this week’s report on the ongoing discussions of the continuing crisis on the Colorado River. Forty million people and five millions acres of farm land depend upon the water for the river. The 20 year megadrought in the Colorado River Basin has lowered the flow of the river from 15 million acre feet annually to about 12 million acre feet. That puts at risk the not just the water supply, but a large part of the economy of seven states, but also the power production from Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon dams that provides electricity to millions.
This week theDepartment of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation released a final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) in the ongoing, collaborative effort to update the current interim operating guidelines for the near-term operation of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams
While the report from the Bureau of Reclamation blabbers on about how great the Biden administration’s efforts at dealing with the crisis has been, the focus of the articles in this report provide a picture of the importance and the complexities of how seven states and the nation of Mexico will divide up the allocations of the water.
Do they ever learn? In the 1960s, the project that would have provided the water to not only the southwest states, but would have created a continent-wide water management system, the North American Water and Power Alliance, was supported by members of Congress, Robert Kennedy and others, including the Prime Minister of Canada, would have by the 1990s provided water aplenty. I have covered this project often in these reports, and will once again so so in the weeks ahead.
The rest of the report
The U.S. Drought Monitor confirms that California’s drought is gone. Now with less than 5% of the state now in the category of “abnormally dry,” the affect of two winters of abundant rain and snow has produced the best water availability in about 20 years. That has led to the AccuWeather forecasters to forecast this week that the state will be in no drought for both 2024 and 2025.
Under my title, “Action and Proposals on Water Storage and Recycling,” the first article is on the progress of actual work to begin on the Sites Reservoir, which after 70 years since first proposed, and 30 years of delay, is finally moving forward. Sites is an off-stream reservoir and will receive water during wet years from the Sacramento River.
That article is followed by a short video of the Sites Reservoir project, “California’s $4 Billion Water Revolution The Mega Reservoir.”
A third item in this section is by Edward Ring, “Harvesting Urban Storm Runoff,” in which he stresses the point that, “Many of California’s most cherished natural assets are artifacts of human intervention,” making the point long denied by environmentalists and others, that it is human creativity and intent that determines the response to crises in general, and the state’s frequent drought and water shortages.
The concluding item for this week is title, “New Development in Fusion Research,” with the article, “Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion.”
