Below Elephant Butte Dam, Rio Grande Dwindles To Sand

[hatrack]

The Rio Grande at Mesilla Dam, March 2013

“That’s a forlorn-looking river, isn’t it,” Phil King told me as we walked out on Mesilla Dam this afternoon, looking down at the bed of sand where the Rio Grande is supposed to be.

In a good year Mesilla Dam, outside Las Cruces, is diverting farm water by this time of the year, part of the water supply to some 90,000 acres supplied by the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, arguably the most lucrative farming area in New Mexico. The EBID belt of green lines the Rio Grande Valley from Caballo Reservoir to the Texas-New Mexico state line. But it’s been a bit less green in recent years.

King, a New Mexico State University professor who also serves as an advisor to EBID, told me that during the good times, the river flowed here year ’round. But the last time that happened was in 2003, and it’s been getting progressively drier ever since. One of the farmers I talked to this morning, Dino Cervantes, described playing in the river as a boy. “It’s sad, really said,” Cervantes said as he drove me down the Rio Grande levee near some of his family’s acreage.

EDIT

http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2013/03/12/blogs/nm-science/the-rio-grande-a-forlorn-looking-river.html

[lonestarnot]

1. Goodbye AZ!

[pscot]

2. They could just pave that sucker

and have themselves a freeway from El Paso to Brownsville.