Notes

Windmill, Pacific Ocean near Todos Santos, BCS, Mexico 2009

©EOP

Occasionally I shall post some random notes about issues, comments that do not fit together coherently. This is the first such posting.

This morning I was looking for some materials on local water concerns to use with the course, and I learned of a problem which was new to me. Fairfax City includes within its boundaries a sizable tank farm, a gasoline and diesel fuel depot. In 1992 there was a large underground spill that sent gasoline and other petroleum derivatives in a plume far downstream into the Mantua area of Fairfax County. That leakage cost a huge amount of money spent to clean up impacts in a scenic and generally uparket residential area. I had not paid attention to a much smaller leakage found in late 2009 which has not yet been fully cleaned up. The leak is fairly small, but it marks yet another insult to the land and waters of the Potomac Basin.

Several weeks ago I read reviews of James Lawrence Powell's Dead Pool (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-520-25477-0), a  history and analysis of the dams on the lower Colorado especially Glen Canyon and Boulder Dams. The reviews were correct, for it is one of the most important books on water issues in the United States published in the past decade and should be required reading for almost everyone concerned with water supply in an era of population growth and climate change. The first few pages describing what might have happened if Glen Canyon Dam had failed in 1983 make for harrowing reading. The remainder of the book examines how the dams have shaped life in the southwestern corner of the continental US (and in adjacent parts of México) and what may happen as rainfall decreases due to climate change, reading almost as harrowing as the first few pages.