It Flows at a Price

The Colorado River Delta

One of my favorite stories from my years of radio reporting is one about the Colorado River Delta. For this report, I traveled to Mexico to meet the chief of the Cucapa Indians and biologists studying rare marsh birds. This might sound like a remote issue, but it's not. It's about the water southern Californians use.  The story received a national award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Here's it is on YouTube.

The Colorado River helped build the Southwest and it sustains its economy. The river waters crops and fills bath tubs. It runs from the state of Colorado down to the southeast tip of California, and into Mexico. Before the US built massive dams across it, the river roared into Baja and Sonora, Mexico, creating vast wetlands, and flowed out to the Gulf of California. Today, the river rarely even reaches the gulf. But Mexicans hope to restore the river and it's delta--and they're looking to the US for help.