[ShadowAce]

Well, that's a stupid idea.

Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water.

Says who?

Once you start lowering the Mississippi, then you start restricting commerce and shipping through the entire Midwest. That would affect a lot more than "just" Louisiana and Mississippi.

[z3n]

True, you wouldn’t want to take much water from the Mississippi during normal or low levels, but how often does the mississippi go to flood stage? Seems like every five years or so. You can turn on the pumps and siphon off some of the excess volume to transport to Lake Powell to raise it’s levels. The extra volume there could be preserved for years.

[Bruce Campbells Chin]

Once you start lowering the Mississippi, then you start restricting commerce and shipping through the entire Midwest. That would affect a lot more than "just" Louisiana and Mississippi.

Yup. Seem like the southwest is trying to make their problems everyone else's. Overbuild in deserts, and this is what inevitably happens.

[gundog]

Tapping the Mississippi at the point mentioned shouldn’t lower it upstream.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

And, if the Mississippi flow were greatly reduced, how far up-river would brackish Gulf water flow? It could really alter things in the south Mississippi area. There would be lots of unintended consequences along the entire river.

[usconservative]

Once you start lowering the Mississippi, then you start restricting commerce and shipping through the entire Midwest. That would affect a lot more than "just" Louisiana and Mississippi.

Exactly correct, and in the last 10-15 years we have experienced issues w/the Mississippi river being too low for barges and other freight traffic to move. So this idea gets a big NO from me.

[faucetman]

“Once you start lowering the Mississippi...”

Would it?

I’d like to see some calculations on that.

[AZJeep]

An aqueduct running from the lower Mississippi to the Colorado River (via the San Juan River tributary, at Farmington, New Mexico), with the same capacity as the California Aqueduct, would roughly double the flow of the latter while taking merely 1-3% of the former’s flow.

[bobbo666]

Ah, but if you lower the MS think of all the swamp land that will be drained, and all the new marsh (used to be river bed) that will be revealed.

Redfin will make a killing selling new houses!!!

[zeugma]

Once you start lowering the Mississippi, then you start restricting commerce and shipping through the entire Midwest. That would affect a lot more than "just" Louisiana and Mississippi.

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.