I used to live on the Peninsula up the road from you, now live in Tulare County.
It is not as simple as that. I live around some of the world’s most productive farmland, and I don’t see waste or dripping irrigation pipes. Heck, in the orchards around here, most only irrigate a few times a year at all, others use the same drip irrigation systems you use in your garden, increasingly with moisture sensors and other science to back up the amount of the water dripped at any given time.
Water is and always will be “below average” from now on, plus those averages were based on a population need of 25-50% at the time calculated.
Rant all you want about rural vs. urban water in CA, but it is not as simple as you think.
Just for the record, do you really mean a canal, or would a pipeline do? Do you want barge traffic, or is this just about moving water?
Now we’re talking. To do what the OP is proposing, there’s no point in letting water fall on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, letting it drain all the way to the Mississippi, and then piping it back to the southwest. If you really want to do this, find some valley in the Rockies east of the continental divide, put a dam across the mouth of the valley, and drill a tunnel from the bottom of the valley through the Rockies to the west. In essence, you would shift the continental divide. Depending on the valley, you might capture a hundred square miles of watershed that used to flow to the Gulf of Mexico and diverting it to flow to the Pacific. (I haven’t figured out how much water falls on a hundred square miles in a year, but it’s probably a lot.) Once you’ve done that, the existing irrigation systems could take over.
It varies across the country. In Mississippi we get between 50 and 60 inches of rain a year. The Eastern side of Colorado gets between 10 and 15 inches annually (according to wikipedia).
Not all of the rainfall will produce runoff; some evaporates, some soaks into the ground, some is taken up by vegetation. The amount of reduction also varies by region.
There are vast differences in water law between the East and Midwest, and Rocky Mountain and Western states.
Water compacts between the US and Canada in the Great Lakes region make it extremely difficult to draw Lakes water for uses outside of the watershed. The watershed of the Great Lakes is actually quite small, the Great Lakes refill very slowly, and a large percentage of the water is ancient, having remained in the Lakes since the Ice Age. Even some suburbs of Great Lakes cities which happen to fall outside of the watershed struggle to find water supplies, because they can’t legally draw from the Lakes.
The water from heavy rainfall and flooding helps to recharge aquefers.
Some years, the Midwest isn’t flooded, and the Southwest experiences record rains. Ever notice that since the start of time, the weather is always claimed o be worse than the previous year. According to farmers, it’s always too wet, too dry, decent rainfall but all at the wrong times, and so on. There’s never a good year as far as they’re concerned.
It’s probably a minuscule amount compared to the amount that falls on tens of thousands of square miles in a year. Especially since the hundred square miles you’d be adding would be well into the mountains, where most of the water has already been precipitated out of the air anyway.
My answer in this thread was short and to the point that the money you’d have to sink into it kills the project. That includes the money for convincing people to allow it.
This reminds me of a water study I did some years ago. There is a reservoir here in MS which has a drainage area of about 1300 square miles. We ran an analysis to see if this would supply the needs of our metro area which is appx 250,000 people. It was barely sufficient (we ran the five driest years of record). That is also with our rainfall being about 5 times what it is at the point of interest in Colorado.
My dad once told me his back-of-the-envelope calculations for how much water was in a thunderstorm, how much that would weigh, and why it’s a bad idea to fly through them. Rainfall on a hundred square miles is probably monumental in terms of my needs, but a drop in the bucket compared to the parched southwest.
The hundred square miles was just a guess, anyway. But while a canal from the Mississippi to the southwest is a pipe dream, there’s another way of diverting that water that just might be possible.
This post was worth making just for the puns. Thank you.
Once you achieve a flow (which requires power), and assuming that you’ll continue to draw water, and assuming there aren’t huge leaks or other things that cause significant cavitation, you wouldn’t need to consume power in order to maintain the flow from the higher grounds to the lower grounds, even if you have to go up and over the mountains. Gas thieves and fellow home brewers are quite familiar with basic syphoning.
The North American Water And Power Alliance. Basically, they proposed to divert much of the Yukon River and pump it south through a system of reservoirs in the mountain trenches to the Southwest. This project would be smaller than a canal from the Great Lakes to the Southwest, and would take advantage of the geography instead of fighting it, and it would still be enormous, costing hundreds of billions of dollars over decades.
You could get a siphon-like effect by putting generators on the downhill side and using them to power pumps on the uphill side, but I imagine you’d get some pretty poor efficiencies that way, plus you’re making the system more complex and therefore both more expensive and more error-prone.
We have the technology and know-how to do this! Every year the Midwest deals with fladding that is causing death and billions of dollars of damage. The Southwest, including west Texas is in need of a lot of water that currently is getting dumped into the gulf.
This could be a stimulus program that can be sponsored by the Federal Government, a lot like the freeway system that was put in place during the great depression (30’s).
I am sure that pumping stations will be needed at some locations in order to get the water moving. The biggest obstacle will be the Rockies but a tunnel is possible. The water flow can be regulated and that should minimize any concerns regarding adequate flow in Mississippi and other waterways.
All day I face the barren waste without the taste of brains,
Cool brains.
Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and souls that cry for brains,
Cool brains.
The night are cool and I’m a fool each star’s a pool of brains,
Cool brains.
But with the dawn I’ll wake and yawn and carry on to brains,
Cool brains.
(Chorus)
Keep a movin’ Dan, don’t you listen to him Dan, he’s a devil not a man
and he spreads the burnin’ sand with brains.
Dan can’t you see that big green tree where the brains are runnin’ free
and it’s waiting there for me and you.
Brains, cool brains.
Plato2011, if you have the know-how, then why don’t you tell us how to do it? And no, I don’t mean just saying “tunnels”. How do you build tunnels that long and that deep through solid bedrock?
It is a question of money. How much would it cost, how long would it take (the one above has been worked on for 23 years) and what benefit it would bring.
The real trick is not the engineering (we could do it if we want). The question is making the economic case for it and what repercussions it would have elsewhere (e.g. not empty the Great Lakes ala the Aral Sea).
Water doesn’t flow very well uphill. As mentioned already the cost of pumping it would be enormous. Besides, there is this big wet thing next to San Diego called the Pacific Ocean, desalination is the answer, not cross country canals. http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2009/2009-05-15-093.html