25 thoughts on “Lake Meade”

  1. Since it’s Popular Science, it had to have the inevitable climate change reference:

    Climate change will only exacerbate the problem. Models predict that rainfall in the Colorado Basin could decrease by 15 percent in the next 50 years. “Even 10 percent is brutal,” says marine physicist Tim Barnett, of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. If climate change continues to dry out the region, Barnett found in a 2009 study, Colorado River water deliveries could fall short 60 to 90 percent of the time by midcentury. Warmer temperatures will also increase evaporation from surface water and reduce the natural reservoirs of mountain snowpack that provide a steady source of meltwater, especially in summer. Scientists can’t say how much climate change is influencing the current drought, and in a way, it doesn’t matter. They do know climate change is happening and that it will make droughts worse.

    The models have not proven accurate at predicting anything, so their predicitons of declining rainfall are also worthless. The climate is changing as it has done throughout geologic time including the billions of years when there were no humans.

    I lived in Colorado for 27 years. I encourage people to look out their windows as they fly over. It’s a dry place. The signs proclaim “Colorful Colorado” but many of the colors are shades of brown. Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and much of New Mexico are just as dry as Colorado.

    Because the west is such a dry place, the old saying goes, “Whiskey is for sipping and water is for fighting over.” While we were dealing with water restrictions in the early 2000s, downstream states were demanding we deliver water that we didn’t have. I was tempted to go piss in the Colorado River to contribute my part to those downstream states.

    1. I noticed that, too, LarryJ.

      Specifically, it struck me as a pointless paragraph given that it was immediately preceded by this one (emphasis mine):

      Even more troubling, scientists have learned by studying tree rings that the 20th century was one of the two wettest 100-year periods in the past 1,200 years. There have been many extended droughts in the Southwest over the past two millennia, some lasting for three decades or more. The water shortages occuring today might not be an aberration but a return to a historical norm.

      So, the 20th Century was one of the wettest in the last 1,200 years, there are records of 30+ year droughts in pre-industrial times, but GW/AGW/CAGW/ClimateChange is to blame for the impending water crisis?

      It almost seems as if someone forgot to cull that whole paragraph about historic droughts from the article before press time. If it was left in intentionally, it certainly doesn’t jive with the paragraph that follows it in the article, (the one you posted) about how Climate Change will make droughts worse than they were over the last 70 years since the dams were built.

      1. Interesting how they’re using tree rings to show rainfall levels. Why, I thought tree rings showed the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Who knew the rates of tree growth could be effected by things other than CO2? [/sarc]

        Droughts in the West are common. It’s a dry place. They really need to adjust those water allocations to more realistic levels but getting them to do so will be very difficult policially. Everyone wants something for nothing. Colorado had good snowfall this last winter and the snowpacks are above normal but that follows years of below normal snowfall. You can’t deliver what isn’t there no matter how what the politics of wishful thinking says. I remember for years how some of the downstream states were demanding that Colorado release more water into the rivers. It didn’t matter if we were in a drought, they wanted their full allocation. Piss on them.

  2. I keep looking at these large boring machines … and then watching the smaller ‘slabbing’ of granite with high-pressure waterjets (with, or without sand) and wondering if large-scale mining has missed an approach.

  3. Ah, yet another “Climate change is killing us” screed from PopSci. They closed their comments a while back so that informed contradictory ideas wouldn’t confuse the narrative. The politicization of SciAm preceded the Climate scam and it is unfortunate that PopSci has joined them in service to their new polical-religious affiliation.

  4. When I saw them quoting Mr Integrity Peter Gleick I had to stop. I wish I could take back my hit on that site.

      1. Yeah I understand…it just chaps my hide that they spoil what could be an interesting article with claptrap

      2. Since they’re drilling below the waterline, I wonder how they’ll handle the last few feet of the tunnel. It seems unlikely that they’d want to drill all the way into the water. The flooding would be a mess and you’d likely ruin that expensive drilling machine. Perhaps they’ll drill very close to the water, withdraw the machine, then use explosives to finish the job.

        1. I wonder if they will withdraw the machines? For the English Channel tunnel, some of the boring machines were left in place (after tunneling out of the way.)

  5. I am surprised that the Obama administration let this project move forward. Wonder who the head Democrat in Nevada is.

  7. There are plenty of places in this country that flood with annoying regularity. It would be useful if a collection network of pipelines/tunnels could be built in, say, the Upper Midwest, to suck away potential floodwater as rivers rise, pump it through one or more very large diameter transport tunnels, then distribute it, via more pipelines/tunnels, to chronically under-filled reservoirs in the Desert Southwest such as Lake Meade in Nevada and Mono Lake in California. This could be an infrastructure project on par with the Interstate Highway System and solve two big problems at once in widely separated parts of the country.

    One significant problem I can foresee would be that of filtering the water flow for lifeforms one doesn’t want to see repotted from, say, Fargo to Las Vegas. But, hey, we’re Americans. We never let a little engineering challenge slow us down.

    1. Given how much howling there is over Rail projects, I doubt pipelines will
      be any more popular.

      2. The politics should be fairly straightforward. In the Upper Midwest, the project should be salable as a flood control measure. In the Desert Southwest it should be equally salable as a water project. Sadly, I would expect nearly all of the objections to such a new major infrastructure project to come from where it usually does, namely from people who more or less share your politics, not mine. Even so, I’m guessing one could pick up a lot of left-wing support for a long-distance water project throughout the entire Desert Southwest.

        The detailed nature of the most cost-effective infrastructure would have to be worked out and would probably consist of a combination of buried pipelines, subterranean tunnels and above-ground aqueducts. Pipelines and tunnels would probably be the default choices because they are least likely to require eminent domain takings, just some access easements should do. Aqueducts might be the best way, as in Roman times, to span valleys or other topographical declivities.

        In places where hill or mountain ranges are an issue, siphon pipelines or tunnels could be used to eliminate all or part of the pumping otherwise required.

        1. Except the problem with MidWest flooding isn’t excess rain, it’s decreased infiltration due to farmland and increased runoff. Pumping all of that water from the MidWest to the SouthWest may be a temporary flood mitigation measure, but then the MidWest aquifers would dry up faster than they’re already drying out.

          We may have just had another wet early June, but I believe most of Iowa is still technically in a drought, much the same as in Colorado, where one record snowy winter can’t wipe out year after year of dry winters.

          Buckets of precipitation all at once may help the totals for the year, but it doesn’t replenish water reserves or help crops grow. Regular occurrences of smaller rainfalls, restoration of prairie land, and smarter building practices are needed to make that happen. By the same token, we here in the MidWest need to stop building in the gorram flood plain, but we can’t seem to convince anyone that it’s inadvisable to do so; we just build “floodable” structures instead, which don’t really address the issue of allowing water to sit in the plain and soak back into the ground.

          1. How to insure that enough of what rain or snow falls on large regions is enabled/allowed to soak into the ground and replenish aquifers is really a separate issue. I was figuring the extraction points for my proposed water transfer network would all be along established watercourses and would activate when submerged by rising water. Installation of these in-feed lines would be based on historical records of flood frequency and severity in combination with mass flow of targeted watercourses. The first parts of the network, in other words, should extract water from large rivers that frequently exceed their banks/levees. These watercourses should have many extraction points along their most troublesome stretches. Based on this system of prioritization, there are many places as far away from the Desert Southwest as New England, upstate New York, even the Deep South, that would rank above most places in the Great Plains as potential sites for water extraction in-feeds.

          2. Near Chicago, there is a rule that Lake Michigan water may only be used for drinking water in the watershed, so that it eventually returns to the lake. My ignorant speculation: I assume that kind of consideration generalizes. So, if midwest flood water is eventually going to the Gulf of Mexico, then fine, pump it to the South West, but if the water is going back to a lake, you’ll want to keep it in the same watershed.

          3. After googling, I think this is whatt I should have said in my previous comment: your pumping scheme will need to comply with the Great Lakes Compact.

            (The compact makes the watershed a legal issue, which was my point, but additionally, now I’m wondering if Chicago drinking water actually does return to the lake. In my previous comment, I was thinking it did, but then I thought about why the Chicago River was reversed!)

          4. I wasn’t suggesting tapping any of the Great Lakes directly as they aren’t involved in flooding except for maybe a bit of on-shore surging during really bad storms. There are certainly rivers and streams that feed into the Great Lakes. If any of them are subject to frequent flooding that results in significant property damage, then the Great Lakes Compact might be an issue. Most rivers prone to flooding, though, seem to be tributaries of other, even larger riverine systems like the Mississippi. These eventually empty into the sea, so diverting floodwaters from them doesn’t mess directly with either aquifers or natural reservoirs.

          5. Gotcha. The flooding that is bad enough to make the national news is what you’re thinking of, I suppose. Several rivers near Chicago do have very frequent flooding, and there is a medium-sized Army Corps of Engineers project to deal with it going on a few miles from my property, so that’s what came to mind first for me. Anyway, your idea is very interesting to think about. I wonder if similar schemes have been seriously studied.

  8. This might be a very stupid question, but here goes; Why do they need intake tunnels at all?
    Wouldn’t it be far cheaper and faster to deal with the lake level issue they way they do with lake Mead marinas; they use floating docks, and simply relocate them as the lake level changes. So, for a water intake, run surface pipelines (you’d need several to equal the capacity of a tunnel) to the lake shore, then from there via floating supports to a large floating dock, on which sits a pumping station (Not high pressure, just enough to get the water uphill to the main station.) They evidently prefer water from below the thermocline, so hang a vertical riser from the dock.

    As the lake level falls, you’d need to adjust the pipelines where they reach the shore (or make them self-adjusting via flexible lines snaked on a slipway, they way they do for the water and sewer lines for floating docks).

    Incidentally, there’s a large floating dock complex just south of the intake project; I was there a few months ago, and it seems to be coping with the falling lake level just fine.

    1. Just a guess, but the hills seem to be at least 700 feet above lake level. That would require more than 300 psi of pump head. There are 2 million Vegas residents, and their water consumption is capped at 212 gallons per day. Supplying that volume at a steady rate through a 300 psi head rise would require 46 MW of pump input power at 100 percent pump efficiency. More like 80 MW for real pumps. Even at Hoover Dam’s ultra-cheap power rates, that comes out to over $57 million a day, or $0.13/gallon. No one is going to pay $3,180 a month for water for a family of 4.

      1. Mfk, I think I may have phrased my concept poorly. Let me try again,

        The purpose of the deep access tunnel they are digging, and also my concept of a floating intake, is to get water from the lake to the existing main pumping station (near the old shoreline).

        There is no reason to go over hills (called saddle island) between the lake and the pumping station. It’s true that the deep tunnel (intake 3) follows such a route, but it doesn’t need to. Going southeast 3/4 of a mile from the pumping station brings you to the lakeshore without going over (or under) any high ground, it’s just a gradual slope (I’ve driven and hiked that area of the shore in the recent past).

        The main pumping station is at about 1244 feet above sea level. Current water level is about 1090 feet.

Comments are closed.