Pumping water

[Shang]

sorry to the Socal folks but you cannot have the columbia river. die of thirst or move same with the folks in the east if you dont have the water on your patch you aint getting ours and you to can die of thirst or move.

sam kennisen had it right (its SAND!!!!!)

Uh, TwoMeter, got some bad news for you.
The Grand Coulee Dam and the the Columbia Basin Project thus far have cost $1,687,000,000. Our tax dollars at work.
So don't be surprised if you see hundreds and hundreds of tax payers gathering along the banks of the Columbia River with buckets...

[Canoeyawl]

Floods are a benificial part of our ecosystem. It is a distribution of water and nutrients to the surrounding land providing life and sustenance for hundreds of miles beyond the apparent river itself.
Controlling rivers with dams and draining flood plains with canals will eventually show as some of the largest man-made disasters ever.

As far as not much money in it that depends on who you are. For example if you were the publisher of a newspaper or a land developer in Los Angeles or Phoenix in the early 1900's you had a lot to gain. So much money in fact that "wars" were fought over this issue. This only highlights the current issue of concentrated wealth, those in that position are the ones with much to gain from projects like these.

[2MeterTroll]

sure did and it has powered the region for the last 50 years through aluminum and steel to today when the tax payers are off the hook and the private companies are to start doing the job. now all those power companies are building wind mills on tax dollars. this is what i really dont get. we pay a power company to build the dam then we subsidize the dam maintenance for 50 years as agreed the power company makes money that they never pay back to the tax payers, then when the actual bill come due they suddenly are doing the same thing in another energy source and the dams are out moded. Agh most folks just want AC and dont care about how the power comes in. not worth the effort of educating people about it.
the region has paid the country back and as far as many of us are concerned you can have the dams move em out to Georgia or something.

Uh, TwoMeter, got some bad news for you.
The Grand Coulee Dam and the the Columbia Basin Project thus far have cost $1,687,000,000. Our tax dollars at work.
So don't be surprised if you see hundreds and hundreds of tax payers gathering along the banks of the Columbia River with buckets...

[Mad Scientist]

The Red River runs through the middle of Winnipeg, Manitoba. To prevent (or at least reduce) spring flooding, they've built a bypass which starts at the Red River south of the city and runs around the city's eastern boundary, and empties into the river north of the city. No pumping, just gravity.

Tom

[Shang]

"...That dream of almost-free irrigation, supported by power ratepayers, is one that has plagued the project since the first water arrived on the land. More than other farmers in the West, Columbia Basin Project boosters saw no reason why they should not have the same conditions as the wetter regions to their east. They demanded irrigation to compensate for that lack and they wanted someone else to pay the bills..."

http://content.lib.washington.edu/gr...k-excerpt.html

[Michael D. Storey]

It is my experience that environmental non-normative phases bring some benefit. Forest fires, super cold winters, etc. I would suggest that there could be a considerable downside to removing drought. Plus, who decides how much water is enough, how much is too much. What if it needs to go the other way next season, but the havers refuse to share. Water wars? And, in areas of little water, people don't kill over who screws who, they kill over water. Happens already.

[Chip-skiff]

A problem I have with your proposals, John, is that you seem not to have much practical knowledge of the physics of water and streamflow, nor of water resources and how they're managed (or mismanaged). Further, the physical forces (e.g. gravity) and immense quantities involved make such simplistic notions as installing big pumps and shunting "excess" floodwater to some storage site an impossible order to fill.

Since you're sincerely interested in the subject, p'raps you should put in some time studying it. You might come up with something the rest of us have missed.

[John Smith]

Localized piping systems to get water past choke-points in the river channel are a reasonable idea. What I think would be a better idea is redirecting the runoff from paved surfaces so it is retained and released to the river system slower, or if that is not possible due to lack of storage space (likely the case in many situations), getting it past the choke-points and then treating it before it goes into the river or ocean. Providence, Rhode Island did something like this. They dug a big tube under the city that can hold the runoff that used to go straight into the river along with raw sewage (the storm sewer and sanitary sewer system use the same pipes) until it can be treated over the course of a number of days. The primary goal was to reduce the sewage input into the bay but it also helps a little to reduce flooding. That all makes sense.

What you have yet to convince me makes sense is trying to move such water over large distances to places that are in a drought. I feel very confident that if you conducted a cost-benefit analysis you would find:

A. Small-scale projects would bring so little water to the drought areas that it would really only help a handful of farms, and the expense of it would far, far, far outweigh any financial benefits to both the farmers and the places where the flooding would be reduced. Yes, we are capable of grand undertakings if we put our mind to it, but it is neither wise, nor brave, nor visionary to spend $100 billion to deliver $2 billion worth of water and save $5 billion worth of homes and businesses.

B. Large scale projects would have the benefits of scale but not enough to make the whole thing make any sort of economic sense. We might get to where we are spending $100x to deliver $10x worth of water, but that is still an makes no sense. Large scale projects would also quickly bump into the problem that when there is any sort of serious drought the available supply of extra floodwater anywhere on the continent is generally very small compared to the need, and as I have already said, storing enough water to make a difference would require not a reservoir covering a few square miles but a reservoir cover a few thousand square miles.

Obviously my numbers are not based on any sort of detailed analysis; they are just my clear impressions based on what I know about the volume of water needed and available.

You can go on about our lack of vision and suchlike but I think you first have to refute the facts I have been laying out regarding the scale and economics. We could probably manage to build a 5 mile high building if we put our mind to it but there has to be some sound, well-thought through reason for doing so. Occasionally a project comes along that we do just because it is grand, such as the moon landings, but this does not strike me as such a project. Your idea strikes me as one that has to be based on a solid cost-benefit analysis and I think any reasonable such cost-benefit analysis would show that the idea is wildly un-economical.

To top it off, ecologically speaking occasional floods are an important part of the ecology of most river systems. While we can justify heavy-duty flood control in certain heavily settled areas (where settling has probably increased the magnitude of the floods in any case), away from cities it would be very bad ecologically to get rid of or greatly scale back on natural flooding. Also, much of the world's best farmland is in river-bottom areas because occasional flooding there renews the soil.

It would not be cheap. Water does not have the profit margin oil does. All these things work against my proposal.

That is why my first phase is simply designed to get floodwater downstream fast enough so that is it not floodwater anymore. Where this will save money is in cutting the flood damage we suffer now. There is no doubt in my mind that we could put intakes in selected places along our rivers in NJ and pump water to places down river, past the choke points, and eliminate a great deal of the floods we now get.

There's no profit in doing this; only savings from not having to fix stuff after floods destroy it.

It would be much more expensive to take this same water and run it through pipes into a large tank in Arizona's desert, or such.

I appreciate your thoughtful post. I have no idea how many miles of pipes we have transporting various liquids around this nation, but I'd wager it's in the tens of thousands of miles. I don't see why, if we wished, we couldn't simply lay pipes to pump water through.

I also think we take water for granted. Our nation depends on the proper circulation of water. Life itself depends on water. There may be no protit in water, but it is a priceless thing to have.

The sad fact is that my state has been wrestling for most of my life about what to do with those areas that flood. While they've not done anything, the floods get progressively worse and more damaging. Individually, people buy flood insurance, which gets more and more expensive. Enough damage and we call the feds for help to rebuild.

The last rung on the ladder of things to do seems to be trying to prevent the floods in the first place. Apparently because there's no profit in it, and there's no tax money available to do it with, so the beat goes on.

No one in my lifetime is going to make an effort to do what I suggest, so it becomes a truly moot point. However, I suspect within my lifetime events will come to be that will make this look like it had been a good idea.

[John Smith]

sure did and it has powered the region for the last 50 years through aluminum and steel to today when the tax payers are off the hook and the private companies are to start doing the job. now all those power companies are building wind mills on tax dollars. this is what i really dont get. we pay a power company to build the dam then we subsidize the dam maintenance for 50 years as agreed the power company makes money that they never pay back to the tax payers, then when the actual bill come due they suddenly are doing the same thing in another energy source and the dams are out moded. Agh most folks just want AC and dont care about how the power comes in. not worth the effort of educating people about it.
the region has paid the country back and as far as many of us are concerned you can have the dams move em out to Georgia or something.

Kind of like subsidizing the oil companies, no?

[John Smith]

The Red River runs through the middle of Winnipeg, Manitoba. To prevent (or at least reduce) spring flooding, they've built a bypass which starts at the Red River south of the city and runs around the city's eastern boundary, and empties into the river north of the city. No pumping, just gravity.

Tom

That's fine. Gravity doesn't work everywhere. I'm suggesting the same thing, only with pumps because gravity doesn't do the job in my state,or in many other places.

[bobbys]

I fear you've all misconstrued my concept. I am not suggesting taking water from the great lakes.

The fact is that we have episodes where a river has more water than it can handle, overflows, and destroys a lot of property. It is the excess water of floods that I'd like to find a way to move and save. We could, for example, pick some spots along the Passaic River in NJ. Intake for the pipes in this system would be at a point above normal water level. During Irene last year, that would have allowed for one hell of a lot of excess water being pumped into some large storage place: maybe a man made lake.

The last thing I would suggest is taking from the normal water supply of anywhere, but there are frequently places where they not only have more water than normal, but far more than they want.

Someday, IMO, this will be necessary. Remember this thread a decade from now.

.

Having been born 4 blocks from the Passaic River and Living in Clifton, Fair Lawn and back to Garfield I remember the River being brown and nasty filled with shopping carts and tires and industrial waste outlets..

Grandpa said they used to fish in the river ..

Course i left in the 70s but its hard to believe that water is good for you..

We could hardly drink the water there.

Course later on our water came from the Ramapo filled with chemicals from the Ford Plant.

We always thought the high rate of cancer from our neighbor hood was from the water.

The Good water went to NYC from pristine Lakes in Northern New Jersey.

[John Smith]

Those who think flooding is a good thing haven't seen people lose everything to a flood. There are clips on the net of homes washing away in floods.

Those who think long term drought is a good thing haven't lived through one, I'm guessing.

It is not my intention to cure the world of all ills, just to capture some water in areas that have way too much at the moment and deliver it to places that have way too little. I believe this to be a concept of some merit, but of little profit making potential.

I am obviously in a small minority that believes this to we a valid endeavor. I've said my piece. I suspect, though I could be wrong, that many who'e read or posted here will one day remember this thread and view the idea differently.

[Bruce Hooke]

It would not be cheap. Water does not have the profit margin oil does.

Forget about profit margin. What you have to come up with is a scenario where the benefits are at least in the same ballpark as the costs. You can talk about water being priceless but this is really only at the margin. If you are totally without water it is priceless. If your farm field lacks water and you are going to have to pay for that water it is pointless to pay more than you can make on the crops and pointless for society to pay more than it sees the crops as worth. If we truly reached a point were it was a matter of people in the US starving if we did not get more water to the Midwest farm fields I am sure we would find a way to do it but there is a hell of a lot we could do first, like reducing how much crop land we devote to raising meat. If food prices go up this will happen naturally as people look for cheaper ways to eat. My sense is that food prices would have to get to truly insane levels before it would make economic sense to start trying to move around vast quantities of water and I see no reason to expect that the will get to those levels given all the options for raising food more cost-effectively. There is a lot of marginal farmland in the northeast, where serious droughts are rare. If food from the Midwest got a lot much more expensive it would make sense to bring more food production back to the northeast.

The sad fact is that my state has been wrestling for most of my life about what to do with those areas that flood. While they've not done anything, the floods get progressively worse and more damaging. Individually, people buy flood insurance, which gets more and more expensive. Enough damage and we call the feds for help to rebuild.

The sad facts are that the solutions are well-known, they are just not very popular:

1. Do not build in flood-prone areas. Take down the buildings that are there. This would be hugely expensive either for the individual owners if they were forced to bear the cost or for society of society buys out these folks. Also, towns would bear the cost of losing a lot of property from their tax roles. We already do this in isolated, really extreme cases, but it is relatively small compared to the total value of flood-prone structures.

2. Having removed the buildings restore the wetlands. The loss of wetlands and their ability to store water is one of the major reasons for increased flooding across many areas.

3. Force building owners to retain any water that falls on their buildings and parking lots and put it into retention basis where it can be percolated slowly back into the ground. This is standard now with new developments (outside dense urban cores like Manhattan) but we still have lots of cities with buildings built right up to the sidewalks and no place to send the water other than the city's storm sewer system. Without treatment of some sort this is not typically water you'd want to water crops with because at least the part that runs off roads and parking lots has lots of oil and other contaminants in it.

All of these solutions are expensive and unpopular for obvious reasons. But, if mitigating flooding is the goal I think they'd all be cheaper than trying to pipe the water long distances across the country.

So, for both flood control and farming I think there are lots of cheaper solutions than trying to move around huge quantities of water, even if you could overcome the issues of needing truly vast storage areas to really get anywhere in terms of irrigation water.

[bobbys]

Its a whole horrid story but suffice to say when i asked the town why are you letting building go on in a flood plain/wetlands i was the "bad" guy.

Now guess what, Its flooding.

Builders got their Money so did the town and unsuspecting people bought trouble.

[Chip-skiff]

A good friend, now dead, told me that floods are not the problem. As long as there are rivers there will be floods. In fact, floods are necessary to maintain channels so water can flow freely. The solution is not to build anything subject to water damage on a floodplain, and where such things are necessary (e.g. roads and bridges) to make them resistant to flood damage. He thought the whole Corps of Engineers levee system was insane.

His name was Luna B. Leopold and he was the Chief Hydrologist for the US Geological Survey. A couple of his books— Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology (Leopold, Wolman, and Miller) and Water in Environmental Planning (Dunne and Leopold)— are among the best sources for this sort of discussion.

[John Smith]

Forget about profit margin. What you have to come up with is a scenario where the benefits are at least in the same ballpark as the costs. You can talk about water being priceless but this is really only at the margin. If you are totally without water it is priceless. If your farm field lacks water and you are going to have to pay for that water it is pointless to pay more than you can make on the crops and pointless for society to pay more than it sees the crops as worth. If we truly reached a point were it was a matter of people in the US starving if we did not get more water to the Midwest farm fields I am sure we would find a way to do it but there is a hell of a lot we could do first, like reducing how much crop land we devote to raising meat. If food prices go up this will happen naturally as people look for cheaper ways to eat. My sense is that food prices would have to get to truly insane levels before it would make economic sense to start trying to move around vast quantities of water and I see no reason to expect that the will get to those levels given all the options for raising food more cost-effectively. There is a lot of marginal farmland in the northeast, where serious droughts are rare. If food from the Midwest got a lot much more expensive it would make sense to bring more food production back to the northeast.



The sad facts are that the solutions are well-known, they are just not very popular:

1. Do not build in flood-prone areas. Take down the buildings that are there. This would be hugely expensive either for the individual owners if they were forced to bear the cost or for society of society buys out these folks. Also, towns would bear the cost of losing a lot of property from their tax roles. We already do this in isolated, really extreme cases, but it is relatively small compared to the total value of flood-prone structures.

2. Having removed the buildings restore the wetlands. The loss of wetlands and their ability to store water is one of the major reasons for increased flooding across many areas.

3. Force building owners to retain any water that falls on their buildings and parking lots and put it into retention basis where it can be percolated slowly back into the ground. This is standard now with new developments (outside dense urban cores like Manhattan) but we still have lots of cities with buildings built right up to the sidewalks and no place to send the water other than the city's storm sewer system. Without treatment of some sort this is not typically water you'd want to water crops with because at least the part that runs off roads and parking lots has lots of oil and other contaminants in it.

All of these solutions are expensive and unpopular for obvious reasons. But, if mitigating flooding is the goal I think they'd all be cheaper than trying to pipe the water long distances across the country.

So, for both flood control and farming I think there are lots of cheaper solutions than trying to move around huge quantities of water, even if you could overcome the issues of needing truly vast storage areas to really get anywhere in terms of irrigation water.

I agree with all of that, except it's not so simple. A great deal of the floods that happen in my state are the result of building uptream from where the floods actually happen. The Corps of Engineers, many years ago, had designed some tunnels for run water safely down the river, but it never happened. I don't recall any pumps being part of the system, and gravity simply won't do it.

I would be insane if I thought my proposal would end flooding. It wouldn't. It would significantly lessen the damage of that flooding, which would be a good thing, IMO.

This is low tech stuff. Pipes and pumps.

I wouldn't have the foggiest idea where to start if I wanted to go to the moon. There's a lot of very smart people who figured that out. It took the inventing of a lot of stuff along the way.

My proposal is quite simple. I like simple. We put intakes in scientifically determined places that will only take water from levels above what is safe or normal. If the water level in the river rises above that point we simply pump it some place safe. Pipes and pumps. To pump it to some place for storage for use where areas suffer severe droughts only requires longer pipes.

If I were in charge of such a project, I experiment in stages. I'd begin with simply putting these intakes into the rivers in NJ that can't handle the exceptional rain and pumping water to Newark Bay where it can be handled. If that works, then I would think in terms of where we can pump that water so it is not only no danger to our flood areas, but can be of help elsewhere.

The only two obstacles to this I see are those who think it can't be done, and paying for it, as water usage will not pay for it. The question to which I don't have an answer is: will the saving in food costs, insurance costs, from fewer drought and fewer floods make up the cost of building the system?

We pump and store lots of oil and gas. Water would be easier. In the long run it's a more necessary commodity.

[John Smith]

Its a whole horrid story but suffice to say when i asked the town why are you letting building go on in a flood plain/wetlands i was the "bad" guy.

Now guess what, Its flooding.

Builders got their Money so did the town and unsuspecting people bought trouble.

Buildings mean taxes/revenue. Eventually, this hits the taxpayer. If the flood is bad enough, it's a disaster.

Sometimes it's hard to sell prevention.

[John Smith]

A good friend, now dead, told me that floods are not the problem. As long as there are rivers there will be floods. In fact, floods are necessary to maintain channels so water can flow freely. The solution is not to build anything subject to water damage on a floodplain, and where such things are necessary (e.g. roads and bridges) to make them resistant to flood damage. He thought the whole Corps of Engineers levee system was insane.

His name was Luna B. Leopold and he was the Chief Hydrologist for the US Geological Survey. A couple of his books— Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology (Leopold, Wolman, and Miller) and Water in Environmental Planning (Dunne and Leopold)— are among the best sources for this sort of discussion.

Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff has already been built. Not all of it was built on a flood plain, but the flood plain developed after the building; too much building seems a valid cause.

It's not my intention to eliminate floods or eliminate drought, only to make both less severe. When you look at the technologies that have been developed to drill for and pump oil from extremely deep wells offshore, the concept of moving some water across the country doesn't seem so difficult.

I've said enough here. I thank those who have addressed the idea with serious thought. I'm not in a position to do any of this, so it's not going to get done. If I am correct, however, 10 - 20 years from now some will remember this thread and either I will be proven right or I will be proven wrong.

[bobbys]

Buildings mean taxes/revenue. Eventually, this hits the taxpayer. If the flood is bad enough, it's a disaster.

Sometimes it's hard to sell prevention.

.

Every year i read stories about people having beautiful dream homes on the river.

Few years later there's stories how they flooded...

My Dads advice.

See River ...

Do not build next to it.

[switters]

This is the funniest thread I've read in days,

[John Smith]

.

Every year i read stories about people having beautiful dream homes on the river.

Few years later there's stories how they flooded...

My Dads advice.

See River ...

Do not build next to it.

You mock this through over simplicity. There are many places that have been built up that didn't used to flood. Not all of there are near a river.

The other half of this thread involved drought and the impact it has on drinking water supplies and crop watering supplies.

We have 727 million barrels of oil stored in our strategic reserves.

One day we may wish we had that much water stored for emergencies.

[bobbys]

You mock this through over simplicity. There are many places that have been built up that didn't used to flood. Not all of there are near a river.

The other half of this thread involved drought and the impact it has on drinking water supplies and crop watering supplies.

We have 727 million barrels of oil stored in our strategic reserves.

One day we may wish we had that much water stored for emergencies.

.

Well this time was not mocking you.

[Bruce Hooke]

I agree with all of that, except it's not so simple. A great deal of the floods that happen in my state are the result of building uptream from where the floods actually happen.

Exactly. The development upstream from the areas that are now flooding reduced the wetland area where water would naturally be held and released slowly, it reduced the forestland, which is also good at holding and slowly releasing water, and it increased the impervious surfaces (roofs, roads and parking lots). All of this results in more rainfall ending up in the river very soon after it falls. This in turn results in flooding downriver at whatever the choke points are, or at the places where the development is very close to the river. A typical scenario is flooding in an older urban as a result of increased development in the suburban areas upriver.

The only two obstacles to this I see are those who think it can't be done, and paying for it, as water usage will not pay for it. The question to which I don't have an answer is: will the saving in food costs, insurance costs, from fewer drought and fewer floods make up the cost of building the system?

Again, you'll get no direct dispute from me here. This is not a technology problem; it is a financial problem (and a problem with the supply being WAY, WAY, WAY smaller than the demand, so much smaller as to make the whole idea irrelevant in my opinion). But the first problem is finding a way to make it even close to logical financially.

[Bruce Hooke]

We have 727 million barrels of oil stored in our strategic reserves.

727 million barrels of water is enough water to provide for the drought irrigation needs of something on the order of 50 square miles of farmland. That's 1/1667 of Kansas' land area. Meanwhile, the 727 million barrels is the entire flow of the Passiac River at Little Falls (near Paterson), at peak flood level for 48 hours. So, since you can't take all the water, but a flood likely lasts longer than 2 days, and not all of Kansas is farmland, as a rough approximation you probably need on the order of over 1000 Passiac floods, and over 1000 times the storage capacity we now have for the national petroleum reserve, just to irrigate the Kansas farmland in a drought. Then you have a dozen or more other states to deal with.

I'm sorry to keep hammering on you but I feel like you are not hearing that this is not a problem of lack of vision or lack of technology, this is a problem of a gross mismatch between available supply and demand, and a gross mismatch between the costs and the benefits.

[Ron Williamson]

The Red River floods Winnipeg because it flows a long way north.
Down south, it's all warm and melty, early in the spring.
Up north, it's still friz and all the water has no place to go.

People should look up The Palliser Triangle for one mans opinion about settling the Prairies.
R

[hokiefan]

You mock this through over simplicity. There are many places that have been built up that didn't used to flood. Not all of there are near a river.

The other half of this thread involved drought and the impact it has on drinking water supplies and crop watering supplies.

We have 727 million barrels of oil stored in our strategic reserves.

One day we may wish we had that much water stored for emergencies.

You realize Mother Nature is just trying to put things back like they are supposed to be, right? And 727 million barrels of water wouldn't irrigate Illinois for a week. You don't have a good grasp of the magnitude of what you are proposing to do. One 0.5" rain over 70% of Illinois (probably close to the amount planted in corn and beans) is ~300 million barrels of water. The farmers need weeks of that to save their crop.

Bobby

[Chip-skiff]

Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff has already been built. Not all of it was built on a flood plain, but the flood plain developed after the building.

This is a very odd statement. Do you know what a floodplain is? Doesn't sound that way. I think what you mean is that the building and development decreased the ability of the watershed to catch and hold precipitation, thus increasing the speed of runoff and putting more water in stream channels over a shorter time. Which increases the severity of flooding. But the rivers in New Jersey had floodplains long before there were developers to build subdivisions on them.

Another quote I'll cherish: "Gravity doesn't work everywhere."

The very basic problem with your pumping scheme is that to decrease the flood peak, the pipes would have to be about the size (cross-sectional area) of the river channel. Since you can't compress water, you'd have to pump it really fast, which would take hellish big pumps and enough electricity to run a small city. And then there are problems with rapid flows in pipes, such as cavitation, that ripped huge chunks of concrete out of the overflow tubes at Glen Canyon Dam.

When a river floods, the obvious thing that happens is that the water rises and overflows the banks. The inobvious thing is that river scours sediment from the bed and banks, enlarging its channel (can't do that with a pipe). Since all the entrained sediment also has volume, it increases the flow even more. The water that overflows and swirls around on the floodplain deposits a lot of that sediment in a good way, deepening and enriching the soil. The rest is either redeposited in the channel or carried out to sea or to a terminal sink. Suspended sediment (not to mention bedload, which is gravel, cobbles, even boulders) is hell on pumps.

The typical way to control floods is to build a dam and/or to channelize with concrete, rip-rap, levees, etc. Which confines the sediment (that washes in continually from uplands), gradually filling in the reservoir behind the dam, or being redeposited in the confined channel and raising the level of the bed. This is why New Orleans is so far below the mean flood crest of the Mississippi, and will get keep getting lower as long as the levees get raised.

Look at a picture of any big river in flood, and then imagine the pipes and pumps it would take to convey even a small part of that flow.

[switters]

I will do my best to be constructive and add to the excellent information Chip and Bobby have already posted.

Your idea is not a new one, and is already being done on some regional scale projects, the Big Thompson is such an example.

To understand why larger projects have not happened even though they have been conceived of it would be good to do some easy google searching of Pat Mulroy. She is the water Director for Las Vegas valley. To whet your appetite, I will tell you a little about her dream. during a brain storming session around 2006? (going by memory) an engineer came up with the idea of taking water from the Ohio river in giant canals and storing it in the ogallal aquifer. it would then be pumped over the rockies to the Colorado river, where it could be used in lake mead for consumption in Las Vagas. This woman has pulled off some amazing water swaps, has offered to build desal plants for colorado water users close to the coast. This is a woman who has explored the issues you have posted about. And she has the budget.

So why hasn't it been done yet, and why wont it get done any time soon? If you are interested then the answers are out there.

A sample.

http://coyotegulch.wordpress.com/cat...m-mississippi/

In short; 5 main points

Water power nexus (pumps) it takes on average 125L to grow an apple, it is less energy intensive to ship the apples than the water to grow the apples.
Storage
Cost (Mulroy's project is estimated at 11 billion, which in my opinion is low by about half)
Environment
Political

Good day,

[John Smith]

None of that is what I have proposed. I don't want to "take" water from any river. I want to take water that is dumped in that river that is excess to what the river can handle. This will lessen the flood damage. I then want to sent that water to a storage facility which many people wish existed today.

Colbert of all places: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-col...ought-disaster

My concept might cost $100 billion to do. That's how many days of the Iraq war? There's an old saying, "You don't miss your water till the well runs dry."

You'll note, if you watch the clip, the farmers have drought insurance, paid by the tax payers. We cover their loss and we get higher prices at the market. We don't have to invent any new technology to do this. Only lay a lot of pipes and some pumps and storage tanks.

I'll repeat this because it seems to have escaped so many reading this thread. We put intakes at a point above normal levels for the river or the lake. This is the level that brings us flooding in areas we'd rather not have it. We can pump large volumes at good speed and lessen, if not eliminate, the flooding of populated areas that will then be disaster areas and the taxpayer will help rebuild.

We can send this water through pipes as far as we like. We can certainly store water as easily as we can store oil, and we can certainly use pipes to move it as easily as we do to move oil.

I am cognizant that I'm in a very small minority in thinking this is a project that would be worth spending money on, but I see it saving money in the long run.

Time will tell. My prediction is that 20 years or less from now people on this thread will remember it and maybe think it was not such a bad idea.

While we have no crystal balls, I believe the in Global Warming and climate change. Our nation will have warmer and warmer years, and droughts will be worse and worse.

That's my opinion. I would not have put this post here except for the Colbert piece last night. Here is the Chris Hayes show on this subject

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46979738...75228#48275222

[hokiefan]

None of that is what I have proposed. I don't want to "take" water from any river. I want to take water that is dumped in that river that is excess to what the river can handle. This will lessen the flood damage. I then want to sent that water to a storage facility which many people wish existed today.

Colbert of all places: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-col...ought-disaster

My concept might cost $100 billion to do. That's how many days of the Iraq war? There's an old saying, "You don't miss your water till the well runs dry."

You'll note, if you watch the clip, the farmers have drought insurance, paid by the tax payers. We cover their loss and we get higher prices at the market. We don't have to invent any new technology to do this. Only lay a lot of pipes and some pumps and storage tanks.

I'll repeat this because it seems to have escaped so many reading this thread. We put intakes at a point above normal levels for the river or the lake. This is the level that brings us flooding in areas we'd rather not have it. We can pump large volumes at good speed and lessen, if not eliminate, the flooding of populated areas that will then be disaster areas and the taxpayer will help rebuild.

We can send this water through pipes as far as we like. We can certainly store water as easily as we can store oil, and we can certainly use pipes to move it as easily as we do to move oil.

I am cognizant that I'm in a very small minority in thinking this is a project that would be worth spending money on, but I see it saving money in the long run.

Time will tell. My prediction is that 20 years or less from now people on this thread will remember it and maybe think it was not such a bad idea.

While we have no crystal balls, I believe the in Global Warming and climate change. Our nation will have warmer and warmer years, and droughts will be worse and worse.

That's my opinion. I would not have put this post here except for the Colbert piece last night. Here is the Chris Hayes show on this subject

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46979738...75228#48275222

I'm not arguing whether or not your idea is worth spending money on. I am arguing that it is not physically possible to move enough water, regardless of where it comes from to make a difference. Moving water from a sporadic source makes it even less possible, because the instaneous flow rates required and the storage capacity required become monstrously incredible. The forces of nature you propose overcoming dwarf man's power by orders of magnitude.

Cheers,

Bobby

[Flying Orca]

i suggest fewer people

ftfy.

[John Smith]

I'm not arguing whether or not your idea is worth spending money on. I am arguing that it is not physically possible to move enough water, regardless of where it comes from to make a difference. Moving water from a sporadic source makes it even less possible, because the instaneous flow rates required and the storage capacity required become monstrously incredible. The forces of nature you propose overcoming dwarf man's power by orders of magnitude.

Cheers,

Bobby

Yes, this would be a huge project. Would it be a bigger projectd than the moon landing? Than the Hoover Dam was at the time? The Panama canal at the time.

It would also not be an instant cure. Once in place it might take several years of pulling the excess water from flood areas to get enough to begin pumping to drought areas. It may never be enough to equal the amount of water in those areas desired, but if it saves the crops, it's good.

I'd suggest that this thread displays the problem with America today. We've adopted a "We can't do that" attitude and we are no longer able to do big things or even think in terms of big things. Today's America would not have built the interstate highways or put men on the moon. Today's America would not have built any of the great dams.

We have a problem coming. It's an inconvenient problem, so we'll ignore it, or let God handle it. I simply suggest that we do so at our peril.

Only the passage of time will prove me and idiot or a prophet.

[Flying Orca]

His name was Luna B. Leopold and he was the Chief Hydrologist for the US Geological Survey. A couple of his books— Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology (Leopold, Wolman, and Miller) and Water in Environmental Planning (Dunne and Leopold)— are among the best sources for this sort of discussion.

I should dig those up; I would be interested in hearing what Aldo Leopold's son has to say on the subject.

[Flying Orca]

The Red River floods Winnipeg because it flows a long way north.
Down south, it's all warm and melty, early in the spring.
Up north, it's still friz and all the water has no place to go.

Kinda sorta. There are a couple of different types of floods on the RR around Winnipeg; ice jams north of the city can flood my parents' area without impacting the city proper. The biggest problems tend to be a fast melt compounded with heavy rain or snow during the peak runoff period. The 1997 flood, for example, featured saturated ground from the fall, relatively heavy snowfall over the winter, a quick melt, and a blizzard on April 1st that dumped something like three feet of very wet snow on the ground, which in turn melted within a few days.

The provincial government has become a lot more savvy about ice jams since they caused major problems four or five years back, and now takes a proactive approach by cutting the ice before runoff so it doesn't tend to jam. So far it's worked.

[Paul Pless]

I'd suggest that this thread displays the problem with America today. We've adopted a "We can't do that" attitude and we are no longer able to do big things or even think in terms of big things. Today's America would not have built the interstate highways or put men on the moon. Today's America would not have built any of the great dams.

John,

How about giving us a specific example?

Where exactly would you propose that the water be collected from? Where and how would you store it? For how long would it be stored there? Where would you transport it to for drought relief?

[John Bell]

John, the cost/benefit just doesn't make sense. What you are talking about would cost way more than a few hundred billion. Many trillions would be more like it.

And what is the benefit, actually? That a farmer in a drought stricken area would have a few more crops to sell in a dry year? Once you factor in the cost to grow those few extra bushels of grain, those same bushels become so expensive no one could ever afford to buy them.

Dude, when everyone from all sides of the spectrum are telling you this is an unworkable idea perhaps they are sending you a clue.

[Bruce Hooke]

Yes, this would be a huge project. Would it be a bigger projectd than the moon landing? Than the Hoover Dam was at the time? The Panama canal at the time.

I think the consensus is that yes, it would be HUGELY larger than any of those projects. It would not be especially technically difficult for the most part. We could do it if we wanted to. It would just be a really bad choice to make to do it because it would just cost VASTLY more than it could ever save AND the available supply of water, even if fully tapped into, is so much smaller than the need that it would be almost irrelevant.

[John Smith]

John,

How about giving us a specific example?

Where exactly would you propose that the water be collected from? Where and how would you store it? For how long would it be stored there? Where would you transport it to for drought relief?

I've done that on this thread. I'll do it again. Lake Ponchatrain is an humongous lake. It has a water level limit, however, above which there are flood problems. I would set up a system that would only draw water from the lake when the level is above the "safe" point, and I'd be talking millions of gallons. In NJ, we get floods when the water level in areas rises above the point where the natural flow of the rivers can keep up. I would draw water from these rivers only when the level rose about the "safe" mark.

We don't have to drill miles under water to find this water; it finds us. We simply have to put in the pipes and the pumps, and we can move this excess water as far as we're willing to lay the pipes. We have 727 million barrels of oil stored in tanks in case of emergency. There's no reason we can't store at least as much water.

Phase one is an effort to prevent as much unwanted flooding as we can. Much flooding is, as in NJ, simply due to the natural flow of the fairly flat rivers not being able to move the water downstream fast enough so it goes out from the river and destroys communities. You cannot tell me that we could not take my local Passaic River and put some pipes in place with some pumps (gravity won't do it) and pumpt thousands of gallons an hour down river faster than nature will take it, and dump in safely into Newark Bay. Again, this water would only be drawn when not doing so makes the flooding of the area certain. The only reason this doesn't get done is money; there's no profit to be made. However, there is a lot of money to be saved if we can prevent a significant amount of flood damage.

We have thousands of miles of pipes in this country pumping all kinds of fluids. Why not water?

Matter of fact, we send a lot of water through many miles of pipes; including what comes out of your kitchen sink.

I don't think this project, today, would be as big a project as the Hoover Dam was then. We, as a nation, are very concerned about running out of energy. Would you really want to run out of water?

This is also one of those things where it's hard to sell because there's no immediate profit, and the long term savings are less visible.

We already pump water up into water tanks that feed communities through gravity, but we pump it up there. We don't need to invent anything or find any new technology. We just have to designate places where we can draw water when it approaches danger levels and pump it to large water tanks for storage. Water in those tanks can be used to lessen the impact of droughts.

We can certainly build large water tanks, even if they are large holes in the ground. We can certainly lay pipe whenever we wish. And we have large capacity pumps. How do we lay all that pipe? A mile at a time. Just like we lay highways. I wonder what's cheaper, a mile of a 6 lane highway or a mile of 4' diameter pipe.

If you watched the Chris Hayes clip, which goes on for several show segments, you will see the problem this is becoming. We can ignore it or we can address it. I choose to address it. I'm pretty much alone in that opinion. Don't tell me, ten years from now if these droughts continue and worsen that nobody saw this coming.

[Kaa]

I think the consensus is that yes, it would be HUGELY larger than any of those projects. It would not be especially technically difficult for the most part. We could do it if we wanted to. It would just be a really bad choice to make to do it because it would just cost VASTLY more than it could ever save AND the available supply of water, even if fully tapped into, is so much smaller than the need that it would be almost irrelevant.

But think of all the jobs it will create!!

:-D

Kaa

[John Smith]

John, the cost/benefit just doesn't make sense. What you are talking about would cost way more than a few hundred billion. Many trillions would be more like it.

And what is the benefit, actually? That a farmer in a drought stricken area would have a few more crops to sell in a dry year? Once you factor in the cost to grow those few extra bushels of grain, those same bushels become so expensive no one could ever afford to buy them.

Dude, when everyone from all sides of the spectrum are telling you this is an unworkable idea perhaps they are sending you a clue.

I think you vastly overestimate the cost. Laying pipe is certainly less costly than laying highways. The water supply is free. Only the delivery system costs. You go ahead and watch as we get more and more floods and more and longer droughts and it costs us lots of money in other ways.

I would rather pay to get some water to a farmer than pay him for not being able to grow his crop and paying a higher price at the market because there's a smaller supply of that crop because he, and many, didn't have enough water.

I acknowledge I'm a lone voice here, but so were the Wright Brothers, Edison, for much of his ideas, and a lot of other people who were laughed at by the public. Wait a few years, and I may look like a genius.

If we had started this project a decade ago, the floods from Irene would have been far less damaging. There would be an emergency water supply to help those affected by the present drought.

I think that would be a good thing. Obviously most here don't.

[John Smith]

I've made my case. Time will tell if we should do what I suggest. Being scoffed puts me in some great company.

[bobbys]

I've made my case. Time will tell if we should do what I suggest. Being scoffed puts me in some great company.

.

Dont listen to the haters.

When a man Freestyles with his rap its all good!

[bobbys]

This is a very odd statement. Do you know what a floodplain is? Doesn't sound that way. I think what you mean is that the building and development decreased the ability of the watershed to catch and hold precipitation, thus increasing the speed of runoff and putting more water in stream channels over a shorter time. Which increases the severity of flooding. But the rivers in New Jersey had floodplains long before there were developers to build subdivisions on them.

Another quote I'll cherish: "Gravity doesn't work everywhere."

The very basic problem with your pumping scheme is that to decrease the flood peak, the pipes would have to be about the size (cross-sectional area) of the river channel. Since you can't compress water, you'd have to pump it really fast, which would take hellish big pumps and enough electricity to run a small city. And then there are problems with rapid flows in pipes, such as cavitation, that ripped huge chunks of concrete out of the overflow tubes at Glen Canyon Dam.

When a river floods, the obvious thing that happens is that the water rises and overflows the banks. The inobvious thing is that river scours sediment from the bed and banks, enlarging its channel (can't do that with a pipe). Since all the entrained sediment also has volume, it increases the flow even more. The water that overflows and swirls around on the floodplain deposits a lot of that sediment in a good way, deepening and enriching the soil. The rest is either redeposited in the channel or carried out to sea or to a terminal sink. Suspended sediment (not to mention bedload, which is gravel, cobbles, even boulders) is hell on pumps.

The typical way to control floods is to build a dam and/or to channelize with concrete, rip-rap, levees, etc. Which confines the sediment (that washes in continually from uplands), gradually filling in the reservoir behind the dam, or being redeposited in the confined channel and raising the level of the bed. This is why New Orleans is so far below the mean flood crest of the Mississippi, and will get keep getting lower as long as the levees get raised.

Look at a picture of any big river in flood, and then imagine the pipes and pumps it would take to convey even a small part of that flow.

.

Very informative.

[Kaa]

I've made my case.

Actually, all you did was say many many times that you want this and that you don't care about magnitudes, physics, or how much of other people's money it will take.

Kaa

[John Bell]

We have 727 million barrels of oil stored in tanks in case of emergency. There's no reason we can't store at least as much water.

We have much more than this much water stored. A barrel of oil is 42 US gallons so 727 million barrels equals 30.6 billion gallons. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

Let's put this in perspective, then. They measure water storage in reserviors in acre-feet. One acre-foot of water is the volume of water it takes to cover an area of one acre one foot deep. One acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons.

I'll save you the tedious arithmetic, but the huge oil reserve that is the basis for your comparsion only comes to 93,705 acre-feet of oil. What you are proposing is several orders of magnitude larger than our existing system of storing, pumping, and distributing petroleum. The largest lake in the US, Lake Mead at ~29 million acre-feet, is over 300 times the size of the oil we currently have stored.

A 93 thousand acre-foot reservoir is a major undertaking anywhere and very costly in terms of land aquisiton not to mention the cost of moving that volume of water over long distances. What you are proposing would be hundreds of times greater than a comparatively small 93K acre foot reservoir. Then there is the cost of building, maintaining, and operating a distribution system from the storage reservior to the farm. Electricity, steel, and labor all cost a lot of money. And finally, there arethe evironmental costs of covering up large areas the ecosystem with reservoirs.

[Gerarddm]

Nature wants to be respected, and we should work with it, because the cost of working around it is unsustainable.

[Bruce Hooke]

I've made my case.

No you haven't. All you've done is state what you believe over and over again. To actually make a case you need to respond with more than just unsubstantiated beliefs to the detailed numerical information that has been presented by various people on this thread that would appear to shoot big holes in the basic logic and viability of the ideas you have presented.

You could start by addressing the basic issue of the huge mismatch between the available supply of floodwater and the need during a drought. Do you really think it is worth doing all the work you are proposing in order capture ALL the available floodwater and still only save at most less than 1 percent of the drought-affected crops?

[Chip-skiff]

I should dig those up; I would be interested in hearing what Aldo Leopold's son has to say on the subject.

Another book, A View of the River (Harvard, 1994) is not as technical, being intended for general readers. We became friends when the Forest Service assigned me to help him put on a seminar for FS hydrologists at the Teton Science School. I spent quite a lot of time with him and Barbara in the summer, when they were at their cabin near Pinedale, and also visited them several times in Berkeley. All of Aldo and Estella Leopold's kids became distinguished scientists:

His children followed in his footsteps as teachers and naturalists: Aldo Starker (1913–1983) was a wildlife biologist and professor at UC Berkeley;^[15] Luna B. Leopold (1915–2006) became a hydrologist and geology professor at UC Berkeley; Nina Leopold Bradley (1917–2011) was a researcher and naturalist; Aldo Carl Leopold (1919–2009) was a plant physiologist,^[16] who taught at Purdue University for 25 years; and daughter Estella Leopold (b. 1927) is professor emeritus at the University of Washington, a noted botanist and conservationist.

Besides Luna, I met Nina and Stella. Very nice (and fun-loving) folks.

[Kaa]

By the way, a good article about the Mississippi and the levee system: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/198...ARDS_000347146

If you think it's easy to make floodwaters go to where you want them to go, well... read it :-)

Kaa

[hokiefan]

...

We don't have to drill miles under water to find this water; it finds us. We simply have to put in the pipes and the pumps, and we can move this excess water as far as we're willing to lay the pipes. We have 727 million barrels of oil stored in tanks in case of emergency. There's no reason we can't store at least as much water.

...

Did you miss the post where I calculated that 727 million barrels of water irrigates Illinois for 2.5 days??? Based on the average rainfall in the Peoria area, the farmland in Illinois gets about 18 times this amount of rain during the growing season, April through September.

People farm in the Midwest for several reasons. One is the land was historically rich. Two is that most years it rains enough to get good crops.

Cheers,

Bobby