;>)
Posted on 07/01/2022 6:22:47 AM PDT by libh8er
Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water. All it does is cause flooding and massive tax expenditures to repair and strengthen dikes.
The best solution would be for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build an aqueduct from the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi to Lake Powell, fill it, and then send more water from there down the Colorado to fill lake Mead.
About 4.5 million/gals a second flow past that structure on the Mississippi. As mentioned, New Orleans has a problem with that much water anyway, so let’s divert 250,000 gallons/sec to Lake Powell, which currently has a shortage of 5.5 trillion gallons.
This would take 254 days to fill.
Lake Mead has a somewhat larger shortage, about 8 trillion gallons, but it could be filled in about 370 days at 250,000 gallons/sec.
Within a year and eight months of the aqueduct’s finish, both reservoirs would be filled and most of the Southwest’s water problems would be gone. We built a California aqueduct that saved Southern California and a crude oil pipeline across Alaska that were far more difficult than this proposal.
Very true, but the idiot writing the article says it needs to be "250,000 gallons a minute second."
This is not a well thought out idea. A Star Trek teleporter to move the water is a much better approach.
Pointless daydreams are dime a dozen. Pumping 250,000 gallons a second night and day 24/7 up almost 4000 feet altitude, cost is somewhat higher.
There ya go again.
Clouding the issue with facts, common sense and logic!
> Las Vegas is a fake town. Wasting water for a circus act.
Oddly, Las Vegas is significantly more efficient in water use than other southwestern cities, and certainly uses less Colorado river water than Los Angeles or Denver (neither of which are in the watershed).
Perhaps you’re just scapegoating Las Vegas.
“Once you start lowering the Mississippi...”
Would it?
I’d like to see some calculations on that.
250,000 gallons per second, actually. The elevation of Lake Powell is currently about 3650’, and the elevation of the point near New Orleans can’t be much above sea level.
I’ll leave to the engineers an estimate of pumping costs to raise 13.5 trillion gallons of water more than 3600 feet and to push it through however many miles of pipeline.
Your point though is correct either way though. But the idea is to fill it fast, which is not necessary, IMHO.
I think the highest flow pumps are in the nuclear power field. GPM in the millions, 3000 ft + lift capability, if I’m remembering correctly.
Water is the new oil :-)
So you are claiming that removing 250,000 gals/second (like the author is suggesting) would not lower river levels?
A quarter of a million gallons a second? That’s 900 million gallons an hour.
The pipe would have to be about a mile in diameter.
We can mock the overpopulation of the southwest all day long - but we’d better be prepared for the loss of an enormous amount of fertile farmland.
California definitely needs to invest in Desalination also.
What we can’t do is simply let it dry out and laugh at people. If you like vegetables, you should care.
;>)
From the early years of the Soviet Union, the region around the Aral Sea was viewed as being ideal for the production of cotton. All it needed was water. So irrigation canals were run in from the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea. The results weren’t unexpected, as the poorly-built irrigation canals were pulling between 20 and 60 cubic kilometers of water out of the rivers per year. The Aral simply could not handle the loss of so much water, and the sea level started to drop.Since the USA today is increasingly operating like the old Soviet Union, we could probably expect shipment of water from the Mississippi to the West to have the same sort of outcome.Once, the Aral Sea, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the fourth largest inland body of water in the world, with a surface area of 68,000 km2. Salinity at the time was measured at 10g/L (the oceans are about 35 g/L, and the Dead Sea about 300 g/L). The Aral Sea has no outflow, and is fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya (Darya=river). It’s this lack of outflow that explains the high salinity.
By 1998, the Aral Sea had shrunk to just over 28,000 km2 making it only the eighth largest lake in the world, and the salinity had increased to 45 g/L. By 2007, though, the lake had diminished to only 17,160 km2, and is now divided into two separate basins.
Even the climate in the region has changed, with the loss of so much water, becoming more arid, with significantly decreased precipitation.
The Aral Sea has seen the surface area decline by 90%, and had its volume decrease by 85%, an amount equal to Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.
The Aral Sea disaster was caused by human mismanagement of a natural resource. In the beginning, the Soviet Union simply did not care, and the Aral Sea was one of many Soviet projects with the stated goal of taming nature.
Great idea!
But...but...the journalist said it could be done!
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