Word: caps
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Beneath its distinctive decor, the conspicuous helmet was a cap of riveted metal leaves, weighing up to 11 lbs. and meant to protect a man's skull against sword and club. But was ever a martial object more drenched in symbolic fancy? The helmet had to convey no meaning to the warlord's troops except its own singularity. It was the exact reverse of a "uniform"; it was a portable spectacle. Its shape was not determined by the kind of functional rules that governed the making of a samurai's main emblem, the katana or long sword, whose basic form...
...CAP system is an engineering marvel of the first order. It is designed to move precious Colorado River water, at the rate of more than 10 million cu. ft. per hour, from Lake Havasu on the California border southeast across the state to the expanding population centers of Phoenix and Tucson. A series of 14 pumping stations will force the water through a seven-mile tunnel in the Buckskin Mountains and lift the load 2,900 ft. over the course of a seven-day journey. The flow is monitored by a Modcomp JC 5000 computer situated in CAP headquarters near...
...Arizona, CAP provides an alternative to a well that is steadily going dry. Long dependent on aquifers for most of its water, the rapidly growing state has been depleting its underground supplies twice as fast as they can be replenished. CAP's annual gush will eventually furnish Arizona with some 1.5 million acre-feet of water (one acre-foot is the amount needed to inundate one acre to the level of a foot and is roughly the quantity used annually by a family of four). Babbitt, who is fond of calling CAP his state's "last water hole," likens...
Even with it, Arizona is hardly awash in excess water. Indeed, Babbitt sought to ensure that Arizona's liquid riches would not be squandered, by winning passage in 1980 of the nation's most stringent water-management program. The law discourages the state's farmers from using CAP water to expand production of heavily irrigated cotton and citrus crops by requiring the growers to forgo an amount of groundwater equal to their use of the new supply. The measure also provides for the sale of water rights by farmers to developers and local water systems, thus promoting growth without creating...
...river's waters. Arizona's share was set at 2.8 million acre-feet, roughly one-fifth of the Colorado's flow. Because it lacked transporting capacity, however, the state has used less than half of its legal entitlement, allowing California to take much of the remainder. The CAP's new flow will thus put pressure on Southern California, particularly the booming but arid San Diego area, to find additional sources of supply. While more water from Northern California's High Sierra may be available, the West's continued population boom and unpredictable circumstances like drought could lead to a savage...