My Page: Jeff Thomas
New West Feature
Huge Colorado Runoff Is Mostly a Blessing
As drought continues to hammer southern states—drying out Texas streams, lakes and water supplies—the only things empty in most Colorado rivers are the fishing nets.
“I haven’t seen water like this so late since my first year here in 1985,” said Thomas Schneider, owner of Boulder-based Sunrise Anglers, LLC. “I was guiding last weekend in the park (Rocky Mountain National Park in northern Colorado) and I haven’t seen the Roaring River that high, ever.”
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Using the West’s Water to Extract the West’s Energy: How Much is Too Much?
Water and energy have been inexorably linked in human history at least back to ancient Babylonia, where windmills helped power irrigation as early as 1700 BC. Since then, that relationship has become one of the great axioms of the industrial age – that is, it takes great volumes of water to extract and convert energy resources, and often great energy resources to move and treat water.
And in a world in which such resources are under increased pressure, the interconnection between the two – known as the water-energy nexus to some—may never have been more pronounced. That is particularly true in the arid West, where rapidly increasing populations are expected to more than double the need for more power by 2030, which will compete with agriculture and growing municipal use for freshwater supplies.
“I think it’s really surprising people about the interconnection,” said Tom Iseman, the water program director for the Western Governor’s Association. “For a long time WECC (the Western Electric Coordinating Council) has dealt with water supply and power generation scenarios, but this is the first time we have worked on it from a regional perspective.”
[more]New West Feature
Why Did Colorado Officials Choose to Forgo Disaster Status for the Worst Wildfire in State History?
The Fourmile Fire was Colorado’s largest wildfire disaster in history. But in terms of becoming a declared federal disaster with assistance for individual homeowners who lost their property –- 169 homes lost to the tune of an estimated $214 million in insured loss -– last September’s fire never made it past the starting blocks.
County officials are still shaking their heads at the fact the state of Colorado never even submitted the fire to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for consideration. As reports of underinsured homeowners have surfaced, local authorities now nervously wait to see how many homeowners can afford to rebuild, all while watching for potentially disastrous spring flooding in the foothills west of Boulder.
“Whatever the rules are, I think they should be applied evenly across the country,” Boulder County Commissioner Ben Pearlman said. “My goal was just to be treated like any other community across the country … and we saw that other fires in other locations across the country may have gotten different treatment.”
At a glance, that would appear to be true. Many smaller and similarly sized disasters—measured by the only yardstick available, estimated insured homeowner loss—have received FEMA emergency grants for individuals. According to FEMA records, that includes the 2008 Windsor, Colorado, tornado ($193.5 million); the 2002 Colorado fire season as a whole ($82 million, adjusted for inflation); and the 2009 Oklahoma wildfires ($30 million).
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