What goes into the cat-and-mouse game of forecasting Colorados avalanche risks? The massive river, with tributaries from Montanato Ohio, is a national artery for shipping goodsout to sea. The Arizona state legislature allocated seed money toward a study of a thousand-mile pipeline that would do exactly this last year, and the states top water official says hes spoken to officials in Kansas about participating in the project. Title: USGS Surface-Water Daily Data for the Nation URL: https://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/dv? Design and build by Upstatement. Experts say theres a proverbial snowballs chance in August of most of theseschemes being implemented. The memorial is seeking Mississippi River water as a solution to ongoing shortages on the Colorado River as water levels reach historic lows in the two largest reservoirs on the river, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The agency is moving forward with smallerprojects across the state to reduce seismic and hydrologic risks, like eliminating leaks or seepage, including at four existing dams and related spillways in Riverside and Los Angeles counties. Do we have the political will? For instance, a Kansas groundwater management agency received a permit last year to truck 6,000 gallons of Missouri River water into Kansas and Colorado in hopes of recharging an aquifer. She can be reached at jwilson@gannett.com or @janetwilson66 on Twitter. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, prodded by members of Congressfrom western states, studied the massive proposal. The Great Lakes Compact, signed by President George W. Bush in 2008,bans large waterexportsoutside of the areawithout the approval of all eight states bordering them andinput fromOntario and Quebec. By Brittney J. Miller, The Cedar Rapids Gazette. From The Pueblo Chieftain (Chris Woodka): Hausler's idea is to bring water from the Mississippi just below its confluence with the Ohio River across Missouri and Kansas into Colorado. Telling stories that matter in a dynamic, evolving state. California Gov. Million himself, though, is confident that his pipeline will get built, and that it will ensure Fort Collins future. Why it's a longshot: First, to get across the Continental Divide and into the Colorado River, you'd need an uphill pipeline about 1,000 miles long, which is longer than any other drinking water . Parsons said theplanwould replenishthe upper Missouri and Mississippi Rivers during dry spells, increase hydropower along the Columbia Riverand stabilize the Great Lakes. Environmental writerMarc Reisner said the plan was one of "brutal magnificence" and "unprecedented destructiveness." These realities havent stopped the Wests would-be water barons from dreaming. But interest spans deeper than that. John Kaufman, the man who proposed the Missouri River pipeline, wants to see the artificial boundaries expand. The federal Water Conservation Bureau gave approval Tuesday to piping 440 billion gallons of water per month to Arizona. One proposed solution to the Colorado River Basin's water scarcity crisis has come up again and again: large-scale river diversions, including pumping Mississippi River water to the parched West . The state should do everything possible to push conservation, but thats not going to cure the issue, he told Grist. Were doing everything we can to minimize impacts, maximize benefits, and this project has a lot of benevolence associated with it. In his vision of the Wests future, urban growth will necessitate more big infrastructure projects like his. Viaderos team estimated that the sale of the water needed to fill the Colorado Rivers Lake Powell and Lake Mead the largest reservoirs in the country would cost more than $134 billion at a penny a gallon. The letter and others with an array of ideasgenerated hugeinterest from readers around the country and debate about whether the conceptsare technically feasible, politically possible orenvironmentally wise. Lower Mississippi River flow means less sediment carried down to Louisiana, where its used for coastal restoration. The elephant in the room, according to Fort, is agriculture, which accounts for more than 80 percent of water withdrawals from the Colorado River. A drive up Interstate 5 shows how muchland has been fallowed due tolack of water. When finished, the $62 billion project will link Chinas four main rivers and requiresconstruction of three lengthy diversion routes, one using as its basethe1,100-mile longHangzhou-to-Beijing canal, which dates from the 7th century AD. It might be in the trillions, but it probably does exist.. Rescue the oceans from the pollution that flood waters pick up and dump into the ocean, creating dead zones. Additionally, building large infrastructure projects in general has become more difficult, in part thanks to reforms like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires that detailed environmental impact statements be produced and evaluated for large new infrastructure projects. Weve had a few blizzards along the way, and some gun battles, but it is what it is.. A man from Minnesota wrote to the Palm Springs Desert Sun earlier this month and expressed similar sentiments, warning, If California comes for Midwest water, we have plenty of dynamite.. Kaufman is the general manager of Leavenworth Water, which serves 50,000 people in a town that welcomed Lewis and Clark in 1804 during the duo's westward exploration. No. Buying land to secure water rights would also cost a chunk of cash, which leads to an even larger obstacle for such proposals: the legal and political hoops. There are no easy fixes to a West that has grown and has allocated all of its water theres no silver bullet, she said. In it, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Idaho Attorney General Ral Labrador contend that a new interpretation of a Clean Water Act rule is too vague, oversteps the bounds of federal authority and puts the liberties of states and private property owners at risk. Your support keeps our unbiased, nonprofit news free. Heproposed usingnuclear explosionsto excavate the system's trenches and underground water storage reservoirs. Just this past summer, the idea caused a firestorm of letters to the editor at a California newspaper. Here are some facts to put perspective to several of the. Meanwhile, a rookie Democrat running for governor in Californias recall election last year proposed declaring a state of emergency in order to build a similar project. Famiglietti also said while oil companies are willing to spend millions because their product yields high profits per gallon, that's not the case with water, typically considered a public resource. Snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada Mountains have swelled to more than 200% their normal size, and snowfall across the rest of the Colorado River Basin is trending above average, too. The idea of diverting water from the Mississippi to the Colorado River basin is an excellent one, albeit also fantastically expensive. Politics are an even bigger obstacle to making multi-state pipelines a reality. But the idea hasnever completely died. Trans-national pipelines would also impact ecological resources. "I'm an optimist," said Coffey, who said local conservation is key. Water from these and other large rivers pour. The pipeline would provide the Colorado River basin with 600,000 acre-feet of water annually, which could serve roughly a million single-family homes. But grand ideas for guaranteeing water for the arid Westhave beenfloated for decades. John Neely ofPalm Desert responded: "All of these river cities who refuse to give us their water can stop snowbirding to the desert to use our water. Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. Heres how that affects Indigenous water rights, Salton Sea public health disaster gets a $250 million shot in the arm. Water use has gone down 40% per capita in recent years, said Coffey. If we had a big pipeline from Lake Sakakawea, we wouldn't just dump it into Lake Powell. But there are tons of things that can be done but arent ever done.. Instead, California is focused on better managing the water we have, improving forecasting, and making our groundwater basins more sustainable.. Among its provisions, the law granted the states water infrastructure finance authority to investigate the feasibility of potential out-of-state water import agreements. He raised the possibility that policymakers will seek to build a 900-mile pipeline from Lake Superior to the Green River watershed in southwest Wyoming. It was the Bureau of Reclamation. Follow us on Local hurdles include endangered species protections, wetlands protections, drinking water supply considerations and interstate shipping protections. It might be in the trillions, but it probably does exist.. The concepts fell into a few large categories: pipe Mississippi or Missouri River water to the eastern side of the Rockies or to Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, bring icebergs in. after the growth in California . Not mentioned was the great grand-daddy of all schemes for re-allocating water, known as the North American Water and Power Authority Plan. About 60% of the region remains in some form of drought, continuing a decades-long spiral into water scarcity. The pipeline will end in the Rocky Mountain National park. Precedents set by other diversion attempts, like those that created the Great Lakes Compact, also cast doubt over the political viability of any large-scale Mississippi River diversion attempt, said Chloe Wardropper, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor researching environmental governance. What states in the Southwest have failed to do is curtail growth and agriculture that is, of course, water-driven. The idea of drinking even heavily treated liquid wastemay seem unpalatable, but Westfordthinks people will adapt. Famiglietti saidit's time for a national water policy, not to figure out where to lay down hundreds of pipesbut to look comprehensively at the intertwining of agriculture and the lion's share ofwater it uses. The only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice. The water, more than 44 million gallons a day, would come from 115 wells drilled between 1,000 and 5,000 feet deep in Beryl-Enterprise, a basin where the state has restricted use of shallow groundwater due to over-extraction. Scientists estimate a football field's worth of Louisiana coast is lost every 60 to 90 minutes. The trooper inside suffered minor injuries. Doug Ducey signed legislation this past July that invested $1.2 billion to fund projects that conserve water and bring more into the state. To the editor: While theres no question that the receding waters of Lake Mead are having a detrimental effect on recreation and tourism, the real looming catastrophe is that if the water level of the nations largest reservoir continues to fall and hits a certain level, the hydroeclectic power plant at Hoover Dam will have to shut down. What if our droughts get worse? When that happens, it wont be just tourists and recreational boaters who will suffer. In 1964, a California engineering company proposed diverting flows from the Yukon and Mackenzie River watersheds, shared by Canada and the U.S., all the way to southern California and into Mexico. A Kansas groundwater management agency, for instance, received a permit last year to truck 6,000 gallons of Missouri River water into Kansas and Colorado in hopes of recharging an aquifer. A retired engineer suggested a rather outlandish-in-scope but logical-in-approach solution to the seemingly growing floods in the central U.S. and the water woes of the West Coast - build a nearly 1,500-mile aqueduct to connect the two. This summer, as seven states and Mexico push to meet a Tuesday deadline to agree on plans to shore up the Colorado River and itsshrivelingreservoirs, retired engineer Don Siefkes of San Leandro, California,wrote a letter to The Desert Sun with what he said was asolution 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); A nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Historian Ted Steinberg said itsummed up "the sheer arrogance and imperial ambitions of the modern hydraulic West.". To the editor: With the threat of brownouts and over-stressed power grids, dwindling water resources in California and the call to reduce consumption by 15%, I want to point out we are not all in this together. Most recently, the Arizona state legislature passed a measure in 2021 urging Congress to investigate pumping flood water from the Mississippi River to the Colorado River to bolster its flow. People fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta's Elk Slough near Courtland, California, on Tuesday, March 24, 2020. But we need to know a lot more about it than we currently do.. The snowbirds commonly stay here for at least six months. Formal large-scale water importation proposals have existed in the United States since at least the 1960s, when an American company devised the North American Water and Power Alliance to redistribute Alaskan water across the continent using reservoirs and canals. And biologists andenvironmental attorneys saidNew Orleans and the Louisiana coast, along with the interior swamplands, need every drop of muddy Mississippi water. Large amounts of fossil fuelenergy neededto pump water over the Rockies would increase the very climate change thats exacerbating the 1,200-year drought afflicting the Colorado River in the first place, said Newman, who in his previous job helped the state of Colorado design a long-term water conservation plan. Photos of snowfall around northern Arizona. The Southern Delivery System in the nearby Arkansas River Basin pipes water from Pueblo County more than 60 miles north to Colorado Springs, Fountain and Security. Arizona lawmakers want to build a pipeline from the Mississippi River more than a thousand miles away, a Colorado rancher wants to pipe water 300 miles across the Rockies, and Utah wants to pump even more water out of the already-depleted Lake Powell. The other alternatives have political costs, and they have costs that are maybe more likely to be borne locally, including by farmers and other large water users, she said. The price tag for construction would add to this hefty bill, along with the costs of powering the equipment needed to pump the water over the Western Continental Divide. Among its provisions, the law granted the states water infrastructure finance authority to investigate the feasibility of potential out-of-state water import agreements.