Getting Water Across the Great Divide

Why would you want to?

Don Kansas City

Problem is ill-defined.

We can do it with our spare energy? More to the point, Why? And why should I give my tax money to increase the value of his desert property investment relative to my lakeshore property investment?

So first you have to accept the damage to the lower Mississippi citizens that diversion would require -especially the accelerated sinking of the delta and reduced natural filtration all along the river.

The real problem is that in any physical universe you define, be it one acre or the entire "west", you have X much water and Y much land and it takes Z much water per average person, and the land occupants N want to use water as if they are home in the mississipi delta.rather than in the desert.

NZ < X - period. Holds for each universe Y you define - Iowa farm or Arizona desert or Alaskan rain forest

It is more valid to reduce N or reduce Z - for when you increase X, the other two will quickly increase back to where the problem recurs with X

Better you should bite the bullet and allot existing water by normalized cost of delivery to its fixed-size land parcel - e.g, each acre in the desert gets 1000 units - the product of gallons a month times cost of delivery or draw of those units + rain; each acre in the semi-desert gets 1000 units per month + rain, each acre in the swamp gets 1000 units, etc.

and amazingly, there will be some places that are not suitable for living on that parcels limited water units unless the occupants use of their water is more efficient than that the norm.

There is no reason in the world that a midwestern beef farmer should subsidize a competing western beef rancher by buying him water with his taxes, or that I should pay more taxes so some desert property then becomes relatively more valuable than my own property investment here

Dear BretCahill:

Evaporation.

I can't believe you are worried about it after that rain last night...

David A. Smith

Is this some kind of concept question from your homework? What textbook did it come from because that's a really stupid idea.

Bret, I like the way you think. I've seen your postings in other groups including alt.inventors and someday you're going to hit paydirt with one of your ideas.

I'm an inventor myself (four patents) and I'd like to give you a little advice. Your ideas often revolve around trying to come up with an improvement for an existing device or a new, different way of doing something that's already being done. The problem is that your dealing with things that already exist and have been picked over with a fine-toothed comb for years by teams of engineers. Try this method: look for a problem and solve it. The next time something annoys you, figure out how to make it less annoying. If you can solve an existing problem and do it economically, you will have a successful invention...it's that simple. It's often the hardest thing to do (that's why it hasn't been done), but it is practically guaranteed to succeed. It takes creativity (which you obviously possess) and a good knowledge of engineering and physics.

Good luck with your ideas. Perhaps our paths will cross someday.

Water wars are in state as well as interstate.

In SE Texas I once asked an aid to my state representative what was going on in Austin. He knew it was mostly to be conversational so he opened up a little.

"They want OUR water" he answered with mock indignation. He was torn between being a patriotic Texan loyal to the whole state and his constituents who were typical geo greedy Texans. They weren't going to give up Sabine or Neches water to West Texas without a fight.

He went on with the attitude of the locals:

"Sure they can have some water. They can bring their gallon jugs over here and we'll fill 'em up."

I got into it too, mentioning the RO plant in Tampa Bay. He said, "hey, you're good. All the barrier islands down to S. Padre are on reverse osmosis water. It's got to be cost effective if they are using it."

He went on and on. Finally he got more serious and said, "they'll get the water. They just have to understand everything in life isn't free."

Bret Cahill

snipped-for-privacy@aol.comn>

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Tell me about it.

Several seasons ago, this neck of the woods in South West Oklahoma had a healthy tourist business at the local State park - Quartz Mountain - which has a beautiful lake - seven miles long.

Boats and skiers, campers and state lodge visitors spent money.

The lake was originally conceived as a reservoir for the town of Altus and with cheap Labor Corps labor, was extended with an irrigation canal, twenty miles south to Altus afer WW2.

But rain has been short, and the lake level has declined eight feet or more. Trouble is, the local farmers, who contributed a half mill or so, 60 years ago towards the canals, have a fixed water allotment, come high or low water. [Their contribution probably funded the building of an 8 foot aquaduct - an inverted syphon a quarter mile under the North Fork of the Red River - no more]

The last few years, they have drained the lake. This year, over the heads of the growing lake conservation movement, the council gave an EXTRA lake water allotment to the farmers.

Say bye-bye to the tourist boaters, and kiss off the healthy bass population the lake used to hold - the fish all end up in irrgation ditches - til they dry up!

The farmers here grow cotton. They get a healthy tax subsidy. But worse, the crop sprayers use extremely aggressive crop sprays, so that some local people die, others get cancer, still others have all the appearance of Summer colds and Flu, for weeks, with sore eys, throats etc. The gall bladder removal rate here is astronomical - I've heard 50% of the adult female population of Altus has no gall bladder (though that figure is surely too high).

Tell me about water-wars!

Brian Whatcott Altus OK

Sounds like smart advice to me

Brian W

Why pump it further than you need to, see:

Governor Napolitano could write Governor Arnold and tell him we were going to draw down Lake Powell and California "could have anything that made it over the spillway to Lake Mead."

The stuff I'm drinking is 15000 year old icemelt, not exactly a renewable.

Bret Cahill

"Mark W" snipped-for-privacy@xtra.co. snipped-for-privacy@xtra.co.nz >

Usually other people hit paydirt with my ideas.

I'm more of a muse than an inventor.

My ideas typically are inversions of conventional thinking.

I like to try things backwards, inside out, etc.

Lately I've been pretty good at guessing the decade when some technology was first advanced.

For example, I'm pretty sure someone figured out that water could be moved over mountains with most of the energy recovered with turbines back at the turn of the last century.

I'll see how far off I am in the next few days.

Bret Cahill