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=d9dce18d61ad4a86b0098bd6c2292ba3A 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.