Quote:
Originally Posted by delts145
If the Governor's office is as serious about the issue as they claim then we can reverse the damage. That it is too late is a very long discussion and perhaps now is the time for the Western States to reverse the small but vocal fanaticism that has severely curtailed our water resource retention. As with the other Western States Utah doesn't reclaim and store nearly enough of its watershed. In addition to better water conservation practices, we need a multi-pronged approach for better channeling and storing water from those areas that have an abundance. Sufficient water reclamation and the channeling of water into major metros such as Denver, Salt Lake City, Vegas, and Phoenix will call for major Federal government assistance. It's time that the mega water projects of the past become a reality once again. Whatever mistakes might have been made by storing and channeling water in the past we can learn from. That doesn't mean we should abandon sensible water reclamation all together.
Why do we accept oil pipelines as energy economics 101? All over the world, we pipe oil and gas from energy-rich locations to barren locals thousands of miles to their destination, and yet as dependent as we still are on oil in maintaining our economy, it can't even begin to compare with our life sustainging dependence on water. It's amazing how we teeter on the edge of a cliff and play Russian roulette with these drought cycles. It is by some miracle that we haven't had to deal with a complete cataclysmic drought at this point.
Just California alone in the short term, returning to developing its own water resources would go a long way to stabilizing the emergency that the mountain states find themselves in. Southern California has refused for many decades to develop major sustainable new water reclamation projects. Instead, it literally is allowed to steal water from the Colorado and by association the Green. California has long since passed the legal limit of its water share and continues to do so each year. In the interest of saving this or that bug, California has now put at risk a major portion of America's food supply, not to mention the thousands of critical bird species that depend on bodies of water such as the Great Salt Lake. At least in the short term, the four corner states and Nevada would have a lot more water resource to work with if California would hold up its agreed-upon water allocation. It wouldn't be a permanant solution, but it would be a great first step.
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One major solution in the short term would actually be de-investing in massive water infrastructure projects.
Lake Powell, and all the major reservoirs along the Colorado River, are located in some of the hottest and most arid climates on the planet. Because of this, roughly 1/3rd of the entire volume of runoff (not total lake volume, annual runoff volume) for each year is lost to evaporation, from the sheer size of the surface area of water located in the hot desert.
This pattern/proportion of water loss is repeated downstream at Lake mead, Lake Mojave, and Lake Havasu, meaning the the total initial water volume at the confluence with the Green River is roughly 66% post Powell, 43% post Mead, 28% Post Mojave, and 19% post Havasu.
That's astonishingly over 3/4ths the annual volume of Colorado river water lost to evaporation each year, just by storing the water. Removing lake Powell alone to fill lake mead downstream would result in an instant 1/3 increase in annual Colorado river flow. As Lake Powell is currently the only reservoir that provides no pipeline or drinking/irrigation water, is by far the most environmentally damaging, and the most at risk of water dropping below the level for power generation, it makes sense as the first. It's a massive water waster isolated in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from the nearest sizeable city.
Removing massive infrastructure in the desert, not building more, is a way to dramatically increase water supplies while restoring Colorado river ecosystems.
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