Another Bad Pipeline...This Time It's Water

If you're not from an area near the Mississippi or the Great Lakes, you may not have heard that some people in the dry Southwestern U.S. have been talking about somehow piping water from the upper Midwest to the reservoirs along the Colorado River. This idea has been particularly popular in Palm Springs, California, it sounds like.

Intrepid reporter Frederick Melo, of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, thought that needed some news exposure here in Minnesota so he talked to an expert: environmental engineer Roger Viadero, who with two of his grad students released a technical of what would be involved in such an engineering challenge.

We have been having a drought of our own in these parts, by the way, as Viadero pointed out. And he continued,

“We sent astronauts to the moon,” he added. “We didn’t send the moon to us. People say all kinds of things about what they heard on Facebook. … We’re trying to give them some tools to help people make decisions.”

In their study, Viadero and his students calculated what percent of the Mississippi's flow at Vicksburg would have to be diverted to refill Lake Mead and Lake Powell:

The scientists scoffed at suggestions that [diverting that amount] would save taxpayers money by reducing the need to build and maintain flood levees and other infrastructure along the Mississippi River and its major tributaries. They noted that in 2019, the impact of flooding in the Midwest and southern plains was estimated at $20 billion in flood response, reconstruction and recovery, among other losses.

Even if the diverted river water was valued at just a penny per gallon, the cost to fill both lakes would total at least $134.8 billion, or 6.7 times the cost of the response to the basin-wide Mississippi River flooding three years ago.

And those totals do not include the added costs to acquire land, design and construct a conveyance system, treat the water and provide for annual operation and maintenance.

I'm at a loss to figure out what that $134.8 billion does pay for if it doesn't pay for any of those things. It's clearly ridiculous.

And then there's the size of the thing: It would be at least as wide as an interstate highway (90–100 feet for a pipeline or a very deep open channel), or could be as wide as 1,000 feet for a shallower open channel). It would cross 1,200 to 1,600 miles and multiple states, and have to deal with about 6,500 feet in elevation change through the mountains and Continental Divide (better known as water flowing up hill).

There's more in the article, but those are the key points. Here's a link to the full report.