Explore the Robot River

Photo: Paul Hermans

The Colorado River — the most important water source for 40 million people in the West — is draining. For a century, seven states engineered ways to wring ever more water from the river, defying all natural limitations. But now, the very water laws and policies that shaped progress are rendering the West more vulnerable to drought and less fit to adapt to climate change. Discover how the nation helped turn the Colorado into an artificial system by engineering water projects that now exacerbate instead of solve the problem.

LINK (via: Pro Publica)

Against the Current

Produced for Trout Unlimited.

Super Slo-Mo Surf Goodness

Feds step in with $260 million for California water projects

The biggest allocation is $110 million to build new pumps and fish screens at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam on the Sacramento River. The facility diverts water into the Tehama-Colusa Canal to irrigate 150,000 acres of farmland, mostly on the west side of the Sacramento Valley.

The archaic facility is the largest unscreened water diversion left on the Sacramento River and is blamed for killing endangered salmon and sturgeon. Improvements were authorized in the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act but never funded.

LINK (Via: The Sacremento Bee)

Cadillac Desert

The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District hopes to divert as much of its 30,000 acre-feet of water as possible from the Colorado River every year to the East Slope.

With about 60 percent of the upper Colorado already being diverted by Northern and Denver Water, this project would take another 20 percent of a river struggling to survive.

LINK (Via: The Denver Post)

The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, a public agency created in 1937, provides water for agricultural, municipal, domestic and industrial uses in northeastern Colorado.

LINK