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.
An eon is half a billion years or so.
Only 10,000 years ago, the Sonoran Desert in Arizona did not exist. Mammoth bones from the period were discovered only 50 miles from Yuma.
Your sentiment is correct, but your timing is off.
Huge changes in climate with each glacial period.
Fixed it for them.
Divert any significant portion of flow from the Mississippi and you'll ruin the agriculture of the Delta and bankrupt all the industries that depend on the Louisiana Bayou's aquaculture.
California has hundreds of miles of uninhabitable land near the coast that would be a perfect place to water if nuclear desalinization plants were put into action. From Big Sur all the way down to Santa Barbara.
Well, that would be an option.
Need further study. It would basically turn the Snake River around and create aqueduct from Pocatello to Pinedale, Green river.
*** It is known as the Rocky Mountains. ***
My thoughts exactly. You beat me to it.
A minor detail. Every person driving from the Midwest to Arizona can take a 5 gallon tank of river water with them, but only if they are driving an electric vehicle to avoid negatively effecting the climate.
And then, after climbing about 3,500 feet in elevation, they can empty the bucket into Lake Powell.
The aqueduct idea is crazy, since it requires an enormous amount of energy to lift the water from the level of the Mississippi to the level of Lake Powell.
Let’s see. Old river structure elevation approx 100’ or less.
Spillway elevation Lake Powell 3,700’.
HHP = PxQ/1714
P = 3,600 x .052 x 8.33 = 1,559 psi
HHP = (1,559 x 250,000 x 60) / 1714 = 13,646,000 hydraulic horse power less pump efficiency less driver efficiency.
No problem, he can get the energy to do that from unicorn farts. They seem to work so well for everything else. First though he will have to convince the people along the river that they don’t really need that water to feed the marshes and so forth.
The friction in the pipe is not the real problem, the real problem is the gain in elevation, which is more than 3,000 feet.
It would be impossible to have a single pipe, because the pressure at the Mississippi end of the pipe would be like the pressure 3,000 feet under the ocean, about 1,300 psi.
That means sections of pipe with open reservoirs and then more pumps along the way to lift the water. The amount of energy required is enormous.
Or...
We could cut California loose from the country and let them fend for themselves until they go Thunderdome...
That's not that much, and surely the whole thing is totally feasible. None of the environmental types will mind the 15,000 1K horsepower diesel engines running at full throttle 24/7 to do the pumping.
There is more than that involved. Is it downhill all the way from the Mississippi to lake Powell and/or Mead? I kinda doubt that. You'd have to consider the construction that this would require for all of the highways and other rivers it would cross, as well as the owners of the property across what would be the right of way.
I kinda suspect the person proposing this is no kind of an engineer.
So,California wants to steal water from the Midwesterner states.🙄
Cool clear water.🤔
We need water
Good good water
We need water
And maybe somebody’s daughter
-The Who
I’m sure if this ever gets built, they’ll consider a number of different routes and choose what seems best. It might be a good thing to deliver much of the water directly to Lake Mead and draw less from Lake Powell.
Pointless discussion, anyway, because it’ll never happen.
How about the West living within its means? Deserts aren’t capable of sustaining unlimited populations. But since global warming is said to be raising sea levels, why does the left coast invest in desalinization plants, and use so much sea water that the levels don’t rise?
Oh contrair. They couldn’t be diesel engines. They would have to be electric ones powered by the sun or wind.
California proposed that back in the 70’s and it went no where fast.
Now the Tribes have way too much power and tge fight would be epic.
Let’s steal water from those that properly manage their resources and give it to stupid libtards that screwed theirs all up 🤪
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