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No dam at Boulder City in Nevada and the Los Angeles basin becomes a very different story in terms of habitability. The town of St. Thomas would rise again and
by smkellat 7y ago
No dam at Boulder City in Nevada and the Los Angeles basin becomes a very different story in terms of habitability. The town of St. Thomas would rise again and we’d find that missing B-29 that ditched into what is currently the very artificial Lake Mead. The Colorado River would regain its natural flow.
Silicon Valley would die, though. Where on earth does its water come from? Yes, 85% of the water from Lake Mead. The Los Angeles basin is built up far beyond its natural sustainable water capacity. Unless there is a great leap forward in desalination technology some dams remain a rather necessary evil.
- dahinds 7y agoSilicon Valley gets no water from the Colorado River?
- chrisdhoover 7y agoNo it does not
- nkurz 7y agoConfirming that chrisdhoover is correct, and none of the Bay Area uses water from the Colorado River: https://www.kqed.org/science/14623/bay-area-do-you-know-where-your-water-comes-from https://www.kqed.org/science/14623/bay-area-do-you-know-wher...
- AlotOfReading 7y agoAre you confusing Silicon Valley with Los Angeles? Silicon Valley is near San Francisco, not LA, so it gets its water from Hetch Hetchy and the delta like other bay area cities. [1] [1] https://www.zone7water.com/images/pdf_docs/waterways/waterways-sum04.pdf https://www.zone7water.com/images/pdf_docs/waterways/waterwa...
- kleton 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#/media/File:Water_in_California_new.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#/media/Fil...
- comicjk 7y agoLeaving aside your geographic confusion, you're wrong about how water is used. Silicon Valley has a tiny water demand per dollar of output; they could even afford desalinization if needed. The industry that would die would be farming.
- vkou 7y agoIf farming died, so would we. I'm not sure how the dollar value of software would hold any relevance at that point. This is, of course, snark - but a lot of people fail to realize that agriculture is incredibly undervalue, for how important it is to society.
- persistent 7y agoThe farming that would die is the very heavily subsidized business of essentially exporting California water. It's not like Californians will starve if we lose our cotton industry or if we don't have alfalfa to export to foreign dairies.
- Spooky23 7y agoNot at all. We’d just grow vegetables in the Northeast where’s there’s water. We would be screwed with unaffordable nuts and citrus though. Unfortunately it’s too late for New Jersey and most of the mid-Atlantic.
- smkellat 7y agoThe LA basin supports over 10 million people. Cut its water supply and the missing water has to be made up somewhere. I know full well it LA is 6 hours away from Silicon Valley but make LA run dry on water and CA-wide water restrictions would only get harsher. Remember that Silicon Valley still has a human population to support, too. Desalination has been the technological breakthrough of next Tuesday for most of my life. I’ll be happy to see an actual deployment. Until then we wait.
- nitrogen 7y agoIsn't desalination widely used in the Middle East?