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As Central New Mexico enters an unprecedented drought year, we are at risk of losing one of our most important tools for monitoring the health of the Rio Grande.
For the past quarter century, the Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program – BEMP to its friends and supporters – has collected data on 160 miles of Rio Grande riverside. Formed through a partnership between the University of New Mexico and Bosque School, BEMP has also brought more than 100,000 K-12 students into the bosque, collecting important scientific data while learning about their natural world.
Students count bugs and measure fallen leaves and the depth to groundwater. The data helps us understand the evolution of the bosque, while they gain hands-on science experience.
The source of the problem was right on top of their school. Every time there was a storm, rainwater from the roof would flow into one storm drain until it was full, and then the excess water would flood the street in front of PS5. It was so bad that parents and buses had to navigate around the water. Teachers moved their parked cars away from the school to avoid flooding.
“When a thunderstorm was forecasted you knew there were certain areas not to park,” recalls Albert Padilla, former science teacher at PS5, which serves pre-K to 8th grade, and now Science Supervisor for the School District of Jersey City.
Source: John Wang/DigitalVision via Getty Images
West of Lake Powell, along the Utah-Arizona border, lies a sparsely populated territory of high desert, deeply scored canyons and barren mesas. Here, Utah officials want to build a 140-mile-long pipeline to bring precious Colorado River water west to the thriving town of St. George, in the state s far southwestern corner.
In an era of perennial drought, when the future of the Colorado River watershed, the lifeline of the U.S. Southwest, is the subject of fierce debate in state capitols across the region, the idea of bringing more than 26 billion gallons of water a year to a community of fewer than 200,000 people on the edge of the Mojave Desert strikes many as folly. To officials in Washington County, of which St. George is the county seat, though, it is a critical resource for the future.
The new Biden administration could take action on the Colorado River that would go well beyond the president-elect’s term in office.
The week of Dec. 14, the seven states that are part of the Colorado River Compact began the first step for renegotiating guidelines that will decide how much water the three lower basin states and Mexico will get from Lake Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border, and from Mead’s source, the Colorado River.
The guidelines are interim, signed in April 2007, and are due to expire in 2026. Among the most significant, the guidelines provide long-term stable management of the river and also determine the circumstances under which the Interior secretary could reduce the annual amount of water available from Lake Mead to the Colorado River lower basin states. The guidelines also are a way for the basin states to avoid litigation, part of what prompted the 2007 interim guidelines.