Waterblogged

As you no doubt know, the city hardest hit by the massive flooding in Iowa is Cedar Rapids. That community’s name reminded us of Jeffrey Rothfeder’s vivid account of the flood that struck Rapid City, South Dakota on June 9, 1972. In his 2001 book, Every Drop for Sale, he describes (In a chapter [...]

Filed under: American rivers, Jeffrey Rothfeder, dams, floods and flooding | 1 Comment »

Atlanta Water Shortage points to this Popular Mechanic’s story, The Ten Pieces of Infrastructure We Must Fix Now. We’re bursting with self-involved excitement over here at Waterblogged.info because four of the 10 imminent disasters are water related!
Our copy editor is now running three office pools: one to pick the day that Kentucky’s [...]

Filed under: Atlanta, Atlanta drought, Georgia drought, dams | Tagged: Add new tag | No Comments »

Alternet.org’s new section on water links to scores of up-to-date articles on all of your favorite local, domestic, and global water controversies and calamities–desalination, drought, dams, bottled water, water wars, groundwater depletion and fish extinction in and around the Mediterranean, and China’s efforts to surpass its economic rivals in polluting the environment, just to name [...]

Filed under: bottled water, dams, drought | No Comments »

 [3/6/08: The editorial staff of Waterblogged.info is perplexed by the unusual amount of interest in this post recently, which is among one of our more obscure. Leave us a comment if you can enlighten us as to why. Heck, leave a comment if you can't enlighten us. Ed.]
In the locker room at our local Y—after [...]

Filed under: Africa, South Africa, dams, drought, global water problems | 3 Comments »

Waterblogged.info’s elevator rant: In 1983, Sadam Hussein’s engineers build a gigantic dam on a bed of soft, water-soluble rock and guess what it starts to leak almost immediately and they have to keep injecting a concrete mixture into its base continuously so it doesn’t collapse and after the U.S. invades it leads an effort [...]

Filed under: Iraq, Mosul dam, U.S Army Corps of Engineers, dams | No Comments »

Actually, three dams is more accurate, but the Waterblogged.info team is always willing to sacrifice accuracy in the service of a cute headline. The point is that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose name and title make us wish we were being paid by the letter, is proposing the construction of two new dams and expanding [...]

Filed under: Arnold Schwarzenegger, California water, San Joaquin Delta, dams, water conservation | No Comments »

As the many frequent visitors to Waterblogged.info know–from such posts as this and this–we’re enthusiastic about the salutary effects of ridding the world of useless, outmoded, and ill-conceived dams.
Although the catchily-named The Clearinghouse for Dam Removal Information carefully hews to the unwritten law decreeing that water-related sites must be visually unappealing, it is a [...]

Filed under: American rivers, dams, fish ladders, river restoration, salmon, striped bass, sturgeon | No Comments »

When Waterblogged.info’s sources* revealed that the move to restore California’s San Joaquin River is stalled in Congress, an eerie hush fell over our newsroom; the clattering of the typewriters ceased, the editor stopped chewing on her cigar, the copy boy tip-toed out the door to find a better job. Why, we asked ourselves individually and [...]

Filed under: American rivers, California water, Environmental destruction, Federal government water management, Iraq, dams, river restoration, salmon | No Comments »

In two previous posts, here and here, we pretty much gave Waterblogged.info’s coveted endorsement to the current nationwide trend of removing damaged and/or useless dams to restore and revitalize the rivers they block. Our entire staff was captivated by the short video documentary embedded below that documents the positive—almost magical—effects of dam removal [...]

Filed under: American rivers, Snake River, dams, fish ladders, northwest, salmon, striped bass, sturgeon | No Comments »

Recently I posted an entry entitled Dam Demolition Derby: three down, 74,997 to go. Actually, in recent years 500 dams have been torn down in the U.S., or in engineering parlance, they’ve been decommissioned. The term sounds funny to me in this context—like we’re thanking the dams for their many years of service, giving [...]

Filed under: American rivers, dams | No Comments »