LeakBird

(March 21, 2009, Robert Glennon, AlterNet)
The following is an excerpt from “Unquenchable: American’s Water Crisis and What We Can Do About It” by Robert Glennon. Copyright 2009 Robert Glennon. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington DC.
Editor’s Note: This excerpt is from the introduction of Glennon’s new book and follows a narrative about the water [...]

(March 5, 2009, The Salt Lake Tribune)

I have a classic Western postcard tacked to the bulletin board above my computer. It shows two men in a field holding shovels over their heads, locked in mock battle. Behind them runs an irrigation ditch. The caption reads: “Discussing Western Water Rights, A Western Pastime.”
I know firsthand how [...]

(March 2, 2009, John Laumer, Treehugger)
The Las Vegas Review-Journal cites the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority saying ‘now may be the time to take a serious look at a decades-old idea of capturing floodwater from the Mississippi River and using it to recharge the massive groundwater aquifer beneath the Central Plains.’
Was She [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, Bloomberg News)
On a cloudless December day in the Nevada desert, workers in white hard hats descend into a 30- foot-wide shaft next to Lake Mead.
As they’ve been doing since June, they’ll blast and dig straight down into the limestone surrounding the reservoir that supplies 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water. In September, [...]

(Feb. 9, 2009, Las Vegas City Life)
Reader Dean Baker, president of Baker ranches, writes:
Pipelines built to take the water and the future of rural Nevada to grow the metropolitan cites of Nevada will be the biggest disaster the people of Nevada have ever faced.  It will affect every single person.  Some in Nevada believe cities [...]

(Jan. 28, 2009, Las Vegas Now)

Desalination has been called the wave of the future — an endless supply of water for the parched Southwest. But unlike neighboring water agencies, the Southern Nevada Water Authority isn’t riding the wave.
Local water officials have come up with several reasons why desalination won’t work in the immediate future.
SNWA boss [...]

(Jan. 9, 2009, Salt Lake Tribune)
The Utah Legislature will soon begin its 2009 session, and we may expect bills promoting two favorite pieces of home-grown pork, the Lake Powell pipeline and Transition Power’s nuclear nightmare on the Green River.
But before legislators cast more of our recession-stretched cash before these two swine, they should read the [...]