Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Pipeline to Lake Powell

Why from Louisiana ?? Why not Devils Lake North Dakota ? It's my understanding that Devils Lake ND gets a tad bit saltier every year since it does not have a close natural outlet. This distance is so much shorter.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a...mp;cvid=d9dce18d61ad4a86b0098bd6c2292ba3


A pipe dream, or a possibility? Water experts debate 1,500-mile aqueduct from Cajun Country to Lake Powell.

Two hundred miles north of New Orleans, in the heart of swampy Cajun Country, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1963 cut a rogue arm of the Mississippi River in half with giant levees to keep the main river intact and flowing to the Gulf of Mexico. The Old River Control Structure, as it was dubbed, is also the linchpin of massive but delicate locks and pulsed flows that feed the largest bottomland hardwood forests and wetlands in the United States, outstripping Florida’s better known Okefenokee Swamp.

Clouds of birds – hundreds of species – live in or travel through Louisiana’s rich Atchafalaya forests each year, said National Audubon Society Delta Conservation Director Erik Johnson. They include gawky pink roseate spoonbills, tiny bright yellow warblers, known as swamp candles because of their bright glow in the humid, green woods, and more.

This summer, as seven states and Mexico push to meet a Tuesday deadline to agree on plans to shore up the Colorado River and its shriveling reservoirs, retired engineer Don Siefkes of San Leandro, California, wrote a letter to The Desert Sun of the USA TODAY Network with what he said was a solution to the West's water woes: Build an aqueduct from the Old River Control Structure to Lake Powell, 1,489 miles west, to refill the Colorado River system with Mississippi River water.


“Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water. All it does is cause flooding and massive tax expenditures to repair and strengthen dikes,” wrote Siefkes. "New Orleans has a problem with that much water anyway, so let’s divert 250,000 gallons/second to Lake Powell, which currently has a shortage of 5.5 trillion gallons. This would take 254 days to fill.”

The letter and others with an array of ideas generated huge interest from readers around the country – and debate about whether the concepts are technically feasible, politically possible or environmentally wise. Seeking answers, The Desert Sun consulted water experts, conservation groups and government officials.

Engineers said the pipeline idea is technically feasible. But water experts said it would likely take at least 30 years to clear legal hurdles. And biologists and environmental attorneys said New Orleans and the Louisiana coast, along with the interior swamplands, need every drop of muddy Mississippi water.

The massive river, with tributaries from Montana to Ohio, is a national artery for shipping goods out to sea. And contrary to Siefkes' claims, experts said, the silty river flows provide sediment critical to shore up the rapidly disappearing Louisiana coast and barrier islands chewed to bits by hurricanes and sea rise. Scientists estimate a football field's worth of Louisiana coast is lost every 60 to 90 minutes. Major projects to restore the coast and save brown pelicans and other endangered species are now underway, and Mississippi sediment delivery is at the heart of them.

Siphon off a big portion, and “you’d be swapping one ecological catastrophe for another,” said Audubon’s Johnson.

'My water, your water. My state, your state'
Nonetheless, Siefkes’ trans-basin pipeline proposal went viral, receiving nearly half a million views. It’s one of dozens of letters the newspaper has received proposing or vehemently opposing schemes to fix the crashing Colorado River system, which provides water to nearly 40 million people and farms in seven western states.

Fueled by Google and other search engines, more than 3.2 million people have read the letters, an unprecedented number for the regional publication's opinion content.

Many saw Siefkes' idea and others like it as sheer theft by a region that needs to fix its own woes.

Prolly not doable. But they better hurry up and do something cause its shrinking fast

You would need a nuclear reactor to get enough power to pump water from the Mississippi to Lake Powell. It ain't downhill.

CA has a big blue wet thing to the west called the Pacific Ocean. They need to build a dozen or so big desalination plants along the coast of CA to supply water to the major cities. Problem solved.

How would they power the pumps? The grid is a bit short of power as it is and they have all those EV's to charge twice a day.
The lowest pass over the Rockies is the south pass in WY at about 7400'. The shortest way is straight west through NM but it's a lot higher. Even the south pass requires lifting a river about 1.5 miles straight up. Then the water has to go back south again to the Colorado river (if it didn't get hijacked to turn so. ID and no. NV deserts into productive farmland). We could pay for it all if we hadn't given all that money to the Ukraine.

By the time it makes it thru the decision process and permitting and mapping and geologic ecologic work it would be 30 years. And i doubt by then it will matter

They estimate that it takes 20 years for a nuke to go from initial planning to throwing the switch. Nothing less would provide that much power.

Yeah, phugq those guys. Get your own damned water.

900 million gallons per hour. You can’t fathom the pump and power requirements to pump that vertically 10 feet let alone 10,000 feet.

I wonder what kind of Engineer he is retired from?

I have read desalinization makes sense economically where diesel is free and air pollution is not a concern.

(Saudi Arabia)

I’ve been saying that same thing for 20 years. Building desalination plants before the issue hits critical levels would be far cheaper and likely better built since it wouldn’t be a race against time and maybe with a public-private partnership the plants could be built much “cheaper” and more efficiently than if the government was doing it.

Things like this are too simple and make too much sense for the government to move forward. Our modern planners build to suit our needs yesterday so that when they’re finished widening the road or whatever they’re doing it’s already outdated, they can’t seem to accurately forecast what our needs will be in 20 years and then build to meet those needs. Instead they just have some of the busiest roadways under a constant state of perpetual construction. Of course by waiting until the last minute the costs quadruple or more but since it’s only taxpayers money it’s no concern to them.

If they could find a way to generate electricity from buttsex and effeminate hot air, Cali would never be short in power and could export water from desalination plants.

Aqueducts are not new technology and many cities, towns and hamlets are still supplied via aqueduct. I imagine it’s about as tough to move oil through the millions of miles of pipeline as it is to move water through a pipeline only with a lot less environmental concerns and greeny protests. 😁

Kick all the Illegals out and Water Consumption issue becomes more Manageable..
They don’t call them Wetbacks for Nothing..

Those Planners knew the impact of ever increasing demand having illegals just makes things tougher to deal with..

Lake Powell would have more water in it .. Butt.

Yeah and only about 5 to 7 years is the actual construction. Too much BS and expense to build them, but I am for them if they could clean up the process. Have them running full on building power or a desalination plant when the power isn't needed.

I don't live far from the Old River Control Structure don't think I will live long enough to see that happen.

So far they’ve been able to find a way to generate monkeypox from their disgusting depravity but that’s about it….

If those sick bastards could actually generate electricity or anything positive from “butt sex and effeminate hot air” they’d be so fugging self-righteous, more so than they are now, that they’d require that we all generated electricity. They’d want to show our kids, via the brainwashing of the teacher’s union, how they can make electricity too. If you didn’t want to make electricity because you were tired or you had a headache or you were just too drunk they’d send one of their highly paid volunteers from the local non-profit over to extract the electricity themselves. 😉

This is the answer.

What could possibly go wrong with fugking with the Mississippi River again?

Pipe along interstate 5 from Oregon would be the shortest route, it would provide jobs and water, the cost was estimated few years back at $30 bil.