(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
A Note to Readers
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, and that the New Year will be more than happy.
With two celebrations back to back, the report will be brief this week.
As one can see from the cover photo this week, actual serious forest management is effective in not only limiting the damage from wild fires, but also protecting trees from bark beetles and at least the worst effects of drought. The article, “Twenty-year study confirms California forests are healthier when burned, or thinned”, can be found on page 4.
For the second week in a row, water managers and the media are fretting about the low snowpack accumulated thus far this winter. The snowpack throughout the western states is at best 60 to 70% of normal for this time of the year.
On the subject of water supplies, Edward Ring, in an excellent and brief article, tears the idea of conservation of water as California’s policy to pieces. The article is titled, “Ringside: The Price of Scarcity.”
And since most of the water that flows in the Colorado River comes from the Rocky Mountain snowpack, the worries about the coming summer and the Glenn Canyon and Lake Mead Reservoirs are warranted.
The last item this week is a report from the “North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) – an international regulatory authority overseeing the North American power grid – projected that a majority of regions in the US and Canada will have insufficient… electricity supply to reliably meet demand during extreme weather conditions. A few may even see interruptions under normal weather conditions.”
