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Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?
- slowhand09 4y agoHi, I'm from the government. We are here to help.
- lunatuna 4y agoInteresting no points on the ecology of what the water might bring to the West. I’m sure there some other concerns missing.
- eschulz 4y agoWould reducing 5% of water from this point in Louisiana not also have a noticeable impact and that state's environment? I could see a significant legal battle here, much bigger than we've seen in cases where other states down stream feel as though they are wronged by states upstream. Louisiana will ask itself, "to what extent will we be forced to give water to the entire US Southwest?".
- tresil 4y agoStates like Colorado are already “giving” most of “their” water to other states. Louisiana could probably be convinced to do the same. Reducing the flow of water in Louisiana by 5% would not have noticeable impact on the state’s environment when you consider that annual variability of water flow must be far higher than 5% for such a vast and dynamic watershed. If that kind of annual variability is not often creating headlines, outside of flooding - for which this kind of project could only help, then it’s difficult to imagine how a far smaller variance would have meaningful impact.
- wil421 4y agoThe army corps of engineers killed Louisiana’s ability to create land by taming the mighty Mississippi River. The river used to change direction and spew sediment into the barrier islands. For the past 100 years the barrier island have been shrinking due to sediment loss.[1] I saw a documentary recently about canals that will be used to direct sediment into the barrier islands before it reaches the Gulf. >Until this USGS study was undertaken, environmental managers thought that the principal cause of barrier island erosion was rising sea level. Now, we know that both the longshore movement of sediment and the general absence of sand-sized sediment is the principal cause of the islands' instability. The sediments underlying coastal Louisiana are made up mostly of silts and muds which do not contribute to the building of beaches, dunes, and spits—geomorphic features associated with healthy barrier islands. In addition, long-shore currents redistribute the available sand from headland areas to embayments, depriving shorelines of much needed sand. [1]https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/barrier-islands/ https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/barrier-islands/
- trevorboaconstr 4y agoWhy don’t people just do things that use less water?
- kickout 4y agoLong and convoluted story. Mostly agriculture driven and not residential. Cadallic desert is a good Book
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- kickout 4y agoPlease stay away from our water. I want no part in helping California become more unsustainable. ETA: to westerners- You have enough water to maintain first class lifestyles. Allocate/ration it better or cap population. Stop stealing from others.
- stmfreak 4y agoAgreed. I’m in California and it is pretty obvious our water problems are due to outflows exceeding inflows. They are draining the reservoirs faster than ever. They were full three years ago and are supposed to last five to seven years of drought, by design. Meanwhile, natural reservoirs like Tahoe do not even recognize there in a drought.
- chrisbrandow 4y agoThe outflows exceed the inflows suddenly because the inflows have dwindled of late.
- space_fountain 4y agoLake Tahoe has dropped from it's most recent peak in 2019 and inflows do appear to be lower than normal, though perhaps normal should just be thought of as having changed
- skybrian 4y agoConsider the difference between stealing and buying water, and that often, in the Mississippi watershed, there is too much water. Selling water you don't need or want and getting paid for it doesn't seem like a bad thing? Although, a lot depends on the price.
- jtdev 4y ago
- kickout 4y agoselling mineral or water rights for a dime today is poor short term thinking. How did the owens valley owners make out after selling there water? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars ETA: although only optics, very bad look for the richest state to “buy” water from one of the poorest states in what would almost 100% be a poor long term deal for Louisiana.
- ramraj07 4y agoThis seems like the correct thing to do. There was at one point in time a more popular push in India to “connect all the rivers”. I was too young to fully understand what that meant, and also it’s not always easy to know whether something that’s proposed is truly feasible. But infrastructure to move water around your country especially when a large chunk is a desert makes perfect sense. I originally imagined this would mean somehow exploiting the Great Lakes but the argument suggested here seems quite practical. Not saying wasteful agriculture on export crops shouldn’t be banned (it should) and perhaps people should stop having so many golf courses, but free flowing water is a true mark of advanced Civilization and it’s not unfair for a country to build the infra to guarantee it.
- kickout 4y ago
- s5300 4y agoCalifornia being the 5th largest world GDP if it were its own country, I think it may come out on top pretty easily. Also the home of things we bomb the shit out of people with…
- kickout 4y agoYou think CA would still be 5th in GDP without reliable water? Unless desalination becomes more efficient, CA is thirsty.
- bee_rider 4y agoIt looks like agriculture isn't a huge percentage of their economy, so they'd probably still be up there (unless I've misread the chart). https://www.statista.com/statistics/304869/california-real-gdp-by-industry/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/304869/california-real-g...
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- WheatM 4y ago
- CoastalCoder 4y agoIf California hasn't lived within its means so far, why do we think that would change after giving them other regions' water?
- BurningFrog 4y agoYeah, people and systems don't generally change until they have to.
- creato 4y agoIs there any region that “lives within its means” for all resources? Why is exporting or importing water so different from electricity, or food, or clothes, or iPhones?
- deadbolt 4y ago> Is there any region that “lives within its means” for all resources? Why is exporting or importing water so different from electricity, or food, or clothes, or iPhones? Changing the water supply changes the environment of the entire region. It's needed for human survival. Surely you can see how that's different that exporting more or fewer iPhones, right?
- bcrosby95 4y agoWe can do without the water. If the country could do without the crops. As a Californian, I don't mind. But I have ran across some people who simultaneously think we need to keep growing, but, refuse to consider the idea of helping us with our water problem. It isn't a California problem. One way or another, it's a USA problem. Food or water. Pick your poison.
- kickout 4y agoWe can grow that food in others places that get rainfall. If they won’t grow, we can and should breed them so they do grow.
- alar44 4y ago
- happyopossum 4y agoThe proposal wouldn’t really provide water to California - this is about Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and the Colorado river. I suppose some of that water could also be diverted for use in California, but that’s not what the author is asking for.
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- Cupertino95014 4y ago"our water" -- this is exactly how Northern Californians talk about water. "We don't want to send it to LA so they can water their lawns & wash their cars!" Guess how that turned out.
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- gsk22 4y ago
- colineartheta 4y agoWould you care to elaborate? It seems awfully threatening.
- jtdev 4y ago
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- jvanderbot 4y agoThis is the worst take that I can't avoid hearing about. How does one build a canal that moves water uphill for 1500 miles across the continental divide in these quantities? If not a canal, then how do we do it? Pipes? We're talking a million cubic feet per second in the Colorado river during high times, which has been completely drained and diverted by communities downstream. The keystone pipeline carries 50 cubic feet per second. The largest pipeline in the world carries 1.5x that. Nowhere close to what a functional river provides. So, either antigravity so the Mississippi flows uphill, or 20,000 keystone pipelines. Desalination plus local pumping is much, much less science fiction.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _8j50 4y agoHow? You investigate and research! Tunnels, alternate locations,using solar and wind to generate pump power and once operational, using a dam to supplement the pump with hydroelectric power. I mean, this is one challenging area where the best and brightest should be well funded to come up with a solution instead of writing them off. Desalination is not a dream either. People are fine to talk about colonizing other planets but are so dismissive of acheivable goals like this. Trillions are spent on wars, a fraction of that can be used to desalinate water or create artificial rivers and tunnels to fill up artificial lakes. My idea personally has been to build in parallel to the interstar highways and complement it with high speed railways and artificial rivers. The resulting econominc boom will pay for the cost and you don't need to print money, it can be bonded because you charge for the infrasteucture usage (train,power,car charger and water fees).
- space_fountain 4y agoBonds are a way of printing money, debt in general is how money is printed weirdly enough. And look, maybe our big ideas could focus on something that isn't solvable by just not trying to grow food in the desert or if we absolutely must doing it in a place that doesn't have plenty of land that isn't desert
- cosmotic 4y agoI understand that this is mostly for agriculture, but maybe let's stop building and expanding big cities in the desert. Golf courses in Phoenix, for example, seem like an irresponsible use of water.
- danboarder 4y agoCounterpoint: I grew up in the Midwest along the Kankakee river, and most infrastructure is built for flooding, as it can happen year round. Fresh water is not only abundant, there is often too much, and flooded fields and towns are a real problem. I am all for finding ways to move it west where people say they need it and are willing to pay a premium. Cities in the deserts of earth are more feasible than ever with ingenuity and engineering, and will probably always be much easier than building cities on Mars, for example.
- SECProto 4y ago> I am all for finding ways to move it west where people say they need it and are willing to pay a premium. Note that the premium amount they would be willing to pay is approximately $0.0017 per litre, delivered treated to their doorstep. [1] https://www.phoenix.gov/rates# https://www.phoenix.gov/rates# says ~$5/unit, with each unit being ~750 gallons, or ~2850 litres
- dr_dshiv 4y agoGonna be inflation on that account
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThe great lakes watershed can't be touched. In any case, the solution to floods in a flood plain is to not live in a flood plain or build elevated structures.
- dismalpedigree 4y agoOnly because of a treaty. If there was monetary compensation for the water I think you would get the states and provinces on board in a hurry. I’d be more concerned about the insane water rights problems being shoved upstream to people in the great lakes basins. Telling me I can’t collect rain water to water my garden so somebody who lives in a dessert 2,000 miles away can be guaranteed the ability to water their lawn is insanity.
- bee_rider 4y agoI'm probably just uninformed about this, but can anyone explain why there are so many comments about California here? The article seems to be about: > Lake Powell (Glen Canyon dam on the Utah/Colorado border) and then downstream to Lake Mead (Hoover Dam/Las Vegas) and on through Arizona and beyond. The article seems to use California as an example in a couple places, for example > Water conservation on the part of everyone living in the Southwest is certainly important, but conservation simply can’t do the job. Los Angeles couldn’t exist without the California Aqueduct. Phoenix and other cities in the Southwest are in the same boat. Their future survival depends upon finding large amounts of new water. but I think, at least, the main beneficiaries would be the Southwest states. (?)
- tracerbulletx 4y agoCalifornia takes 27% of the water from the Colorado River. That's more than Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada combined.
- bee_rider 4y agoAh, ok. So the idea is pretty fanciful in the first place, but on top of that the author is also being disingenuous by focusing on southwestern states, then?
- SllX 4y agoThink of California as the furthest west extent of the Southwest for the purposes of this conversation because the colloquial usage here doesn’t really matter. There are a handful of States that contribute to the Colorado River including Mexican States and that river (or what’s left of it by the time it gets that far) discharges into the Gulf of California. Changing supply anywhere in that basin effectively increases water supply in the whole basin but uh, much like extra RAM and highway lanes, it’ll probably just get used up. So the question is really whether Mississippi River consumers and US taxpayers subsidize our lives out here in the American West? I suppose sucking the government teat is a time honored American tradition, just not one I’m fond of.
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- space_fountain 4y agoI feel like this is a very unserious proposal. I'm all for massive engineering projects, but well, I feel like this response which I think like the linked article is basically just a letter to the editor type situation does a good job describing some problems https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/contributors/valley-voice/2022/07/24/engineer-evaluates-idea-pumping-water-mississippi-west/10118039002/ https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/contributors/valley-.... But yeah it's a tremendous construction project, a huge amount of water to lift up into the mountains, and all instead of just growing the food somewhere else and then shipping that.
- BooneJS 4y agoWhat about desalination? Would that be more cost effective?
- happyopossum 4y agoThe states in question don’t have oceans to desalinate.
- thrill 4y agoA couple of nuke plants powering desalination and California could be exporting water to the east. Of course, that assumes a willingness to take their water issues seriously - it's not like they haven't seen it coming for several decades and could have all this in operation already.
- Gibbon1 4y agoTakes about 4000 kwh to desalinate an acre foot of water. Would take about 2GW of solar to desalinate a million acre feet of water. Los Angles takes 1.2 million acre feet of water from the Colorado. Replace that with desalinization, no heep big canal needed.
- mrguyorama 4y agoFor the record, California has an estimated 5.8 GW of wind turbine generation, and in the year 2019 alone, California ADDED 3.1 GW of solar generation capacity. This doesn't require a Nuclear plant or crazy economics or giant nationwide plan. The actual building, machinery, and pipework for desalinating would be a larger infrastructure project than the extra power generation to power it. The only thing this requires is for Californian government to get their head out of their asses, and stop expecting everyone else to just bend over backwards for them.
- mechagodzilla 4y agoI think the problem is that desalinating water (ignoring the environmental impact of the resulting brine) will produce water that costs at a minimum many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot. This is fine for urban use, but makes many of the current agricultural uses uneconomical. Nobody will pay $5,000/acre for water so they can sell their crop for $1,000/acre. All of these discussions dance around the fact that irrigation farmers are largely turning X dollars of water into 0.25X worth of crops, and the taxpayers are making up the difference. This is true of farmers in pretty much every state that uses colorado river water - if we erased 'water rights' and allowed the water to be competitively bid on, many farmers would either leave their land fallow or switch to less water intensive crops. We're basically giving away extremely valuable water at way below market rates, we're practically guaranteed to have a 'shortage.' It doesn't make sense to add enormously expensive infrastructure just so we can turn around and keep giving the water away.
- willnonya 4y agoSo 1500 miles of imminent domain confiscation of property. Impractical engineering. Enormous state, local and federal spending to accommodate this new, man-made river. And no discussion of addressing the absurd laws and abuses that drive much if California's water woes...
- rr808 4y agoBear in mind that solar power is the future of energy - and the Western half of the USA will be the best place for that. Perhaps electricity for water is a fair swap? I dont like in general enabling people to live wasteful lives, but at the same time I feel like we've given up on big engineering projects. Most of the infrastructure we enjoy using in the US and other countries was built 100 years ago. Railway lines, bridges, hydro dams, motorways nothing new is being built any more.
- dsr3 4y agoAs a reference, China has been doing this a similar project to interconnect the North (think Beijing etc) and South (think Shanghai) water system. Heck, they have been doing it since hundreds of year ago [2]. So I guess there is a precedent. Based on this thread, I would guess that a large amount of the problem will not be an engineering one, but political and social one. Constructing such a large mega project to divert would require a national unity and tremendous will to 'sculpt' nature. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Yunnan_Water_Diversion_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Yunnan_Water_Diversion... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
- space_fountain 4y agoBut [0] seems to mostly be gravity fed so doesn't need the construction of 4+ new nuclear power plant equivalent generators and as far as I can tell shorter. [1] is much shorter and proposes to move much less water
- dsr3 4y agoWhile not exactly similar to North America continental divide, traversing from the Yangtze river to the North would require traversing some hilly or mountainous area. [0] mentions that there is some uphill location that required pumps. At this point, there is no feasibility studies on the NA East-West water canal. There is no idea on how efficient it is vs desalination (in terms of energy), its ecological impact, and the required cost for the design and construction. My main idea is that we should not dismiss the idea and that the Army Engineering Corps should at least do feasibility studies on it*. A proper feasibility studies could unveil the true challenge, benefits, and disadvantage (rather than anecdotal guess) of the water canal. I am not exactly familiar with the NA Southwest and Southeast but the canal could possibility bring other benefits, such as reducing the heat in the region and opening up new land for farming and irrigation. It could have a trigger a new economic growth while at the same time, reducing flood risk at the Southeast. There is also a possibility that the this could trigger a transfer of wealth (in terms of payment for water, technical skills etc) from the relatively prosperous south West Coast to the Southeast, reducing inequality. Of course, I am not eliminating the possibility that the canal could be a white elephant and trigger untold ecological and natural disaster, but unless a feasibility studies is conducted, we never know. *US Government, or at least the Federal Entity, are already doing multiple kind of planning and research for dizzying array of contingency. Why should the same mindset is not applied for possible infrastructure development?
- exabrial 4y agoThis just makes me shake my head. I'm not in the industry, but I'm guessing there's a least a bunch of things that could destroy the ecosystem out west by introducing a different ph, foreign mineral content, or lack of natural bacterial content. So instead I have a bunch of better ideas that don't result in ecological disasters: * How about people stop living the desert? Somehow, unexpectedly, there's not a lot of water there. * How about we don't grow baby spinach 365 days a year? We can eat other things in the winter. * How about we reexamine the scientifically unsound pact around the Colorado river?
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- _8j50 4y agoI must disagree, people need space and while conservatism has its place people should live along side nature not outside of it. There is no reason to keep an arid and infertile land the way it is for the sake of novelty alone. How about we turn the deserts into habitable and fertile lands. People are suffering and climate change will only make water and food shortage worse and lack of resources always results in wars and famines. This is what people should be doing before colonizing mars. New fertile lands and sustainable cities built with the lessons of the past 200 years in mind. Instead of continuing to ruin and deplete existing resources, migrate to newer artificially formed areas to allow previously looted areas to recover. Homeless camps in the desert and drying lakes is all that needs to be considered. People will keep living in these areas and other areas will become and less and less habitable.
- exabrial 4y agoInfertile lands are not infertile. There are thousands of rare creatures that inhibit them.
- _8j50 4y agoAnd millions more will inhabit them with water and trees. You can declare state and national parks to conserve desert environment. For example in Cali Joshua Tree national park is a great example.
- olliej 4y agoWhy? These are states that are literally deserts yet continue to waste water. Take Phoenix, something like 50% of their residential water use is watering lawns. The state also just got a brand new TSMC fab, presumably with a bunch of tax breaks and guaranteed water - given that the large fabs use around as much water each day as 3-400k homes, it’s rich to turn around and say you need federal aid to get more water.
- nickphx 4y agoResidential and industrial use combined is still less than 1/2 of agricultural use of water in Arizona... Agriculture that still uses flood irrigation , where they flood a field with water.. instead of sprinklers or more efficient means.. https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts but yeah.. it's people and industry.
- oblib 4y agoAs someone who moved to LA in the early 70s, and left LA in the late 80s, and spent some time to visit Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, I can say with full confidence that anyone with a lick of sense knew there was not enough water to sustain that growth that started back then, but that didn't stop anyone from building or buying those homes. They all knew it, but didn't care. It was, and still is, plain old stupid to build those giant cities in those barren deserts. The idea that we'd all have to pay for pipelines to push that water all those miles feels a bit painful to me now, and the complete lack of any discussion about the environmental impact of doing this very bothersome too. There are many other issues to consider, like the quality of that Mississippi water. They don't call that river "The Big Muddy" for nothing. And there is still a lot of industry that use and dumped used water into it, and farms that have runoff of pesticides all along it and it's tributaries. The total driving distance from New Orleans to Las Vegas is 1,722 miles. I doubt you can route a pipeline in a way that reduces that much. The cost and environmental impact of building one would be enormous. This plan feels like it was concocted by someone who's never driven from Las Vegas to New Orleans, or spent anytime on or around the Mississippi River. It gets low on water too. There are droughts in the mid-west too. Truth is there is no good sustainable solution to this problem as it exist. The only reasonable solution is to stop building new homes right now, and look into how to reduce the number that exists because it's obvious they've already overbuilt. It's hard for me to imagine anyone with a lick of sense taking this seriously, but that's a shortcoming of mine I am well aware of nowadays.
- moistly 4y ago> And there is still a lot of industry that use and dumped used water into it, and farms that have runoff of pesticides all along it and it's tributaries. Sounds like an opportunity to clean the water and bill the polluters for the cost. If only…
- oblib 4y agoIt's not near as polluted as it was in the `40s-`70s but it's still polluted and will always be muddy. I get the feeling the person who wrote that has never actually seen the Mississippi River. It's far from a clear mountain stream you'd walk up to and sip water from. It's not something you'd even want to swim in on a hot day.
- snapplebobapple 4y agoSad that not reading the article before commenting has so obviously come to hacker news. So many comments on here moaning about harming the east to give to a greedy west when what something like this would almost certainly do is help the east flood less while helping the west at least partly solve a water shortage. The concerns about contamination are real but probably manageable though.
- 01100011 4y agoI've pretty much stopped commenting after finding better forums for discussion now. So many of the comments are from angry people with nothing constructive to offer. I have a lot to say about this subject, but it's not worth the effort to deal with all the drive-by shitposts.
- parkingrift 4y agoPerhaps HN should ban paywalled articles? I cannot read this article.
- pasttense01 4y agoJust open it it a private window with your browser.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoIn terms of where the water comes from, sourcing at Old River Control makes a lot of sense. From there the water really does pretty much run into the Gulf of Mexico, and there is no downstream irrigation, power generation, or shipping impact from a 5% diversion. But the writer makes the engineering sound trivial, when it's really not. The first thousand miles are all uphill, so you're not talking about a canal, as the author implies, but rather a pipe. And not a small pipe either. If you move the water at a velocity of a meter per second through a single pipe, you're looking at a pipe 40 meters in diameter. And you have to push that against a head of 4000 ft net. Obviously, you'd want to pump at multiple points with intermediate reservoirs to stage the pressure gradient - otherwise you'd have a static pressure of 1800 psi in the pipe at the source. But when you roll up the pipe, the reservoirs, the pumps, and the multiple power plants to run it all, you're talking about a lot more than the garden hose across Texas the author wants to make this sound like. And much of this is across already arid, water starved land. I'm guessing West Texas and New Mexico will want their own cut of water in return for permitting the project to cut their states in two. You might need to double your total take to satisfy everybody.
- kristjansson 4y ago> power plants I was curious, so some rough estimates: About 1m kg of water per second, lifted about 1km implies about 10GW of continuous power, or about 86 TWh annually assuming the scheme runs continuously, which is about 2% of annual generation. So enormous, but on the scale of feasible, a bit to my surprise.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoCould the pumping uphill also be turned in reverse to serve as a battery? Like, you don’t want to power this with coal, but solar. Maybe this could produce a lot of energy storage potential (albeit in the “wrong” place—but if you have local water, energy and job, it could create some new places!)
- dmurray 4y agoI'd expect you could at least recover some of the electricity with hydropower on the California side.
- BetterGeiger 4y agoMost water use is for agriculture. Most agricultural water use is for meat. Beef is by far the least efficient way to turn water (and other stuff) into protein. I propose we tax meat nationwide according to its water use, instead of dreaming up unrealistic and unnecessary megaprojects.
- colordrops 4y agoThis is a great idea. People need to connect all the big problems with animal husbandry to their immediate lives so they have impetus to stop eating meat. Most people have virtually no knowledge of how bad meat really is. They just see a product on the shelf that they strongly desire.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoIm sure people will react reasonably when a state subsidized luxury good for everyone reveals its reall price over night.
- bee_rider 4y agoWhy do people make these kinds of objections? Taper down the subsidies over time rather than implementing them over night. "If we intentionally implement this policy change in the dumbest, bluntest way possible, it will be disruptive" is an argument for never making any policy change.
- somenameforme 4y agoSo people would just stop eating meat and that's the end of it? Or might it be that you'd then "activate" a sizable chunk of 92%+ of Americans who eat meat to vote for the next candidate who runs on a pro-meat platform. That's a sizable enough influence that the next election would likely look like one big beef industry commercial. If being vegetarian or vegan is an important value to you then the real way to make real lasting progress is by trying to persuade and convince people, not by trying to force or otherwise coerce them into agreeing with you. The same as on any topic.
- Ozzie_osman 4y agoThis was common practice throughout history. The Egyptians built canals, lakes, and basins to divert water from the Nile and vastly expand the amount of livable area and farmland. People think the Great Pyramids are a wonder of the world, but the irrigation projects were potentially more impressive and impactful. More recently, the Libyan government built the Great Man-Made Project, which was thousands of kilometers of pipes pumping water from desert aquifers in the south to the cities in the north, which sounds like one of those crazy dictator megalomaniac ego projects but actually had a tremendous amount of impact (assuming there's as much water in the aquifers they're draining as they think).
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoDoesn’t solve the problem, it just pushes it a bit further down the road. It’s better to accept that the land can’t support the current or projected population and start to right size and reexamine land use. With any luck the trend will reverse in a century or two.
- irrational 4y agoWouldn't the Columbia make more sense than the Mississippi? It has about half the discharge of the Mississippi, but is closer.
- ricksunny 4y agoWhat are the groundwater resources like in the areas that are otherwise proposed for the water to be delivered to? Since we’re talking nation-scale projects here, then I’m talking about at depths from 1km to 3km. https://www.thedriller.com/articles/89083-oregon-irrigation-project-sets-state-water-well-depth-record https://www.thedriller.com/articles/89083-oregon-irrigation-...
- atoav 4y agoBefore looking at the water source, wouldn't doing the bare minimum to control the water sinks would be in order? I mean, we have harder regulations on water useage in the alps, and this is a water rich area where only 3% of the a available water is used. The truth is that the water a land will provide is limited. And of course you could expand this water by also taking the water from another land, but maybe pitting a little effort into not wasting water for unnecessary stuff would already do wonders?
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- dawnerd 4y agoWe could also start mandating the use of reclaimed water in more residential settings. Seems most places if they do it only water some planters and medians. Needs to be code to run reclaimed water to new construction so it’s a least an option in the future. A lot of cleaned water is just dumped right to sea. So wasteful.
- atoav 4y agoThat would be a good start. Personally I am honestly starting to become allergic to proposals of this kind. "We need more {water, electricity, roads, lanes}" all while never mentioning any plans how to use the resources that we already have more efficiently.
- droffel 4y agoIs residential water use really the problem? Relative to agricultural use of water in California, residential water use is a drop in the bucket. Agricultural use of water on its own exceeds the maximum use of water the state can support long run. I can understand the desire to make an impact as an individual, but even dropping residential water use to zero won't do much at all for the problem as it stands. It's a distraction.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoYour problem there is that you have agriculture at all, in a desert. Deserts aren't great places to grow food, and in turn the lack of food and water means that deserts aren't great places for people to live. There's a bootstrap problem to be solved. If you want water, you need ground-covering plants, which need moist loamy soil, which needs water, and so on. For any of this to work you need to start by turning as much grassland as you can get into pasture (with irrigation, sadly, which needs water) and grazing it with livestock, and then kind of building that out over time. Monoculture arable farming makes deserts. You need to stop doing that.
- dehrmann 4y agoOne tricky thing is the Mississippi has water, but the majority comes from the Ohio, nowhere near the Colorado. This is a diagram for capacity, not volume, but you get the idea. https://ian.umces.edu/media-library/flow-capacity-for-the-mississippi-river/ https://ian.umces.edu/media-library/flow-capacity-for-the-mi...
- ricksunny 4y agoOk so similar scale pipeline as Libya’s Great Man-Made River https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River except with narrower pipes and no wells, but adding a need for pumping stations.
- Lazare 4y agoCounter-proposal: Time for people to investigate moving East.
- dismalpedigree 4y agoThe cure sounds worse than the disease.
- markvdb 4y agoLet's compare daily average household domestic water consumption: - where I live: 202l [0] - US: >1135l [1] US household consumption share of total water usage: 12% [1]. Just reducing household usage to 50% more than a random wealthy northwestern European region instead of 560%(!) more equals 10% total water usage savings. That's without even touching agriculture or other water hungry sectors. Aligning usage to be a little less out of line with production seems like the obvious answer here. - But you live in Europe, not the US. You couldn't possibly know how miserable life would be without watering my lawn in the middle of the desert. And what would the neighbours say? - We only have one earth. It's _ours_ you know, not just yours. And our children's. And our children's children's..." [0] https://www.vmm.be/data/gemiddeld-leidingwaterverbruik-gezinnen https://www.vmm.be/data/gemiddeld-leidingwaterverbruik-gezin... (nl) [1] https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
- yellowflash 4y agoOne of them is per family and other per person (family of size 1). Is it even comparable? I am not saying it is lesser, it's pretty high, probably 200% not 560% if I am right.
- simonh 4y agoFamily size of 1 is given as 108L each, but average usage per member of a family of 2.3 people is given as 89L each, so presumably an average total household usage in Flanders would be about 2.3 x 89 = 205L. I'm not sure where OP gets the 202L number from, it doesn't appear anywhere on the page. Possibly mis-reading a date as a consumption, hence I'm using capital L for Litres. That's more than 5x less than the US. It's quite plausible the average family size and environmental conditions in Flanders differ quite a bit from that in the US, but it's still a huge disparity, and according to the second link a lot of that seems to be down to domestic irrigation. Tackling that wouldn't be very popular, of course.
- markvdb 4y agoThe headline says 74000l/household/year. Divide by roughly 365 days a year = 202.7392l/day. I made a rounding error and didn't read further down. Still a very useful approximation I'd say.
- nraynaud 4y agoMaybe it’s time to investigate growing lettuce and strawberries in the Mississippi valley instead of a place literally called the Sonoran Desert. Sending the Colorado water to Los Angeles was already completely stupid. This river runs completely dry in Mexico.
- bitwize 4y agoIt's time for rewilding and Land Back on a massive scale in the west.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoWhy not just admit that the hot dry western side of the US just isn't suitable for the kind of dense human habitation that you have there, and move the people to a more sustainable part of your very large continent?
- i_am_proteus 4y agoNo better place to read a bit more about Old River Control and the work the Corps has done over the years than "Atchafalaya," by John McPhee: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya
- psi75 4y agoOr: people can live in places actually suitable to comfortable human habitation (there's nothing wrong with Michigan or Pennsylvania, as far as places to live go) and put up with the sky being gray 40 percent of the time, and those who legitimately want to live in deserts can put up with not having lawns and golf courses. We also probably shouldn't be growing water-intensive crops in places that don't have water, nor eating ourselves into an early grave but eating twice as much red meat (which is far more water-intensive than the overly vilified almond) as we should be.
- silon42 4y agoI've had a bigger idea... make a dam around Greenland before it melts.
- rogo007 4y ago1700 miles of landowner lawsuits; and one endangered insect will stop any progress until enormous amounts of money and time are spent to make sure we comply with every current environmental regulation. By the time that’s done the South West will be long gone. Years ago when the Mississippi River flooded causing all kinds of damage, all we heard from Californians was how stupid the Midwest folks were to live so close to rivers and now we can say the same. How stupid is it to develop cities in a desert and have to beg for water.
- edmcnulty101 4y agoI'm from New Orleans. The author is dead wrong. The city of New Orleans gets its drinking water from the Mississippi. And the city of New Orleans is the biggest port in the hemisphere based on Mississippi River traffic which is it's economy. Anyway, I highly doubt the modern US government has the capability to build a thousand miles of pipeline over the continental divide. Although it would be interesting to have California dependent on red states. A better solution is to just do nuclear desalination from the ocean like the Arabs do.
- ethagknight 4y agoMoving water West by train sounds like it could be a viable solution. A DOT liquid car can hold 30,000gal, and 30,000gal/sec is the proposed solution from the article, provides at least a sense of scale required. Trains are probably more efficient for moving water uphill than pipes and pumps due to friction losses in the pipe. Bonus points because the infrastructure already exists! All the train would have to do is get water across the continental divide, and release it into a reservoir of choice just across the line. Bonus points for electrifying the railway. During wet seasons, this seems wasteful. During water rationing emergencies, there seems to be no more flexible way to engineer a reflexive water provisioning network.
- JoBrad 4y agoUnless we convert those tracks into 24/7 dedicated track, there’s no way we could deliver the same volume of water by track vs pipe.
- cafard 4y agoWonderful. The federal government built massive projects along the Colorado River. Arizona and Southern California got subsidized water and electricity. It took a very few years for the population of Arizona and Southern California to decide that they were sturdy pioneers and that what the US needed was less government. How many years of Mississippi/Missouri basin water before they resume quoting Ronald Reagan on "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." The Hoover Dam was completed in 1936; Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964; and Ronald Reagan came to political prominence as a speaker for Goldwater.
- _8j50 4y agoSo what? I don't get your point.
- rogo007 4y agoFrom the USDA, “Almonds accounted for nearly 70 percent U.S. tree nut export volume in recent years, averaging over 970 million pounds (shelled basis) or almost three-quarters of world almond exports.” Agriculture uses all the water and agriculture exports most of their produce? So water has to be diverted to California. “ In 2020 the top importers of Almonds,fresh or dried, shelled were Germany ($657M), Spain ($532M), Italy ($354M), Netherlands ($298M), and France ($281M)” Can’t the europeans grow their own almonds? It’s not like we eat tons of almonds.
- NonNefarious 4y agoHow dumb does an editor have to be to publish this article with no map?
- wmil 4y agoThis seems like an overly ambitious project. California hasn't built a new reservoir since 1979 when it only had 23 million people. Build more reservoirs. Right now wet years are flowing into the ocean.
- ewheeler 4y agoFun fact: Hans Albert Einstein, son of Albert Einstein, helped with the design of the Old River Control Structure. According to Wunderground's three-part series about the ORCS[1], there is some uncertainty as to whether it will be able to keep the Mississippi River on its current route without failure. [1] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mississippi-Rivers-Old-River-Control-Structure https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mis...
- neith00 4y ago
- neith00 4y ago
- pasttense01 4y agoA central issue that has not been emphasized here is that the U.S. is incapable of doing major infrastructure projects anymore. Instead it just does maintenance and minor projects of existing infrastructure. Take for example the California high speed rail project--which keeps getting delayed, cut back and going massively over budget.