Lake Powell is 70% empty

Going to take a long time to fill it back up, if ever ..

Saw the same type of thing with Lake Mead. Old towns that were covered by the lake, not seeing the sun in decades are out in the open again.

There is a reason all of those are man made lakes and not natural lakes. The normal water supply isn't there to support a lake long term.

They will eventually refill, but how long eventually is remains to be seen.

Michigan is surrounded buy water. All the lakeshore communities pull water from the lakes. But inland, people use well water and the ancient aquufers are running dry. Mid state we have Nestles pulling millions of gallons a day of FREE WATER out of the ground to bottle and sell. In fact they have just been allowed to pull even MORE out of the ground. MAN, I bet theres some corruption involved there.

Water, the future oil!

I used to have a decent sized powerboat and a group of us from here drug them to lake Powell for a 2 week trip, it just hard to fathom that much water disappearing ..

Would appear Hoover dam and a few other hydroelectric plants are falling to a point that their ability to continue to produce power is in question Hmm might want to hold off on that EV purchase
And remember, you heard it here first, on MOPARTS LOL

It's always amazed me how they decided to build such huge cities in the dessert so far away from any significant fresh water. Seems like someone could make a fortune laying a water pipe along the coast to get water from the sacremento river, or columbia river or several smaller rivers or something. They could lay an undersea water pipe down the coast to LA just like they do oil pipes and if it leaks big freaking deal, patch it up and no mess to clean up! Take the pressure off LA using that water and Vegas and Phoenix would be free to use the colorado without worrying about running it dry (for a while) and let those fake lakes fill back up.

5 or so years ago I wondered:
Where would be the best spot to bore a tunnel to divert water from the Missouri/Mississippi watershed to the Colorado River watershed?

What did I learn?

Denver was already doing.... the opposite!

There are multiple tunnels bringing Colorado River water through the mountains to Denver,
where it ends up in the sewer plants hat empty in the Platt River system and flows east to the Mississippi watershed.

There is a chapter in “Sand County Almanac” about the swamp that used to exist where the Colorado emptied into the Gulf of California.
Sand now.

I took a great white water rafting trip about 1979 down the Colorado River.

Saw a great documentary last year about Dick Griffith
the legendary river guide and wilderness marathon racer
who took the first inflatable raft over Lava Falls
and then returned in his late 80s to be the oldest to row himself over lava falls.

https://themilepost.com/articles/the-last-run-of-dick-griffith/

https://www.pbs.org/video/canyons-ice-the-last-run-of-dick-griffit-i3uoau/

All this made me want to runs the Colorado again.

I wish we could give them some from Pa. Lots of water here.

And most people don't know that the French have been buying up water companies throughout the USA for decades! After all they ARE the people who started the hole bottled water thing. Do some research on that, it is eye-opening!

L.A. has been stealing, buying, paying for water canals and piping water from all over CA since the turn of the century. The first stolen bought water is from the Owens valley on the east side of the Seirra Mountains, it is piped and uses gravity fed water in canals to get to L.A. The next one is the All American canal from the south east corner of CA along the Colorado river and is routed from their through the Imperial and Coachella valleys and pump it into L.A. from the bottom of the White Water grade.
Their are another one or two canals from the Colardo river, one form the Parker Dam ,Lake Havazu, feeding that water into L.A.
The last water piping project taking water form the Sacramento central CA area is the Feather river project that was built in the late 1960s and finish in the early 1970.
Some of the wiser cities along the coast like Santa Barbera and several others further north on the coast have built and are using water desalination plants to reclaim and use ocean water
The immigration, legal and illegal, of all people into SO CA should have been stop years ago due to the water problems and other crisis like no more space for them

An optimist would say Lake Powell is 30% full!
I wish I could send some of our water. My pumps kicking on every 10 minutes from today’s downpours.
Illinois has no shortage of taxes, corruption, crime or water.

So, they’ll just dry up and so long hydroelectric power?

Last summer while in Ludington, MI. the water level of Lake Michigan was higher than I have ever seen it in 50 years.

We need another golf course!

Plenty of water in the ocean but that takes POWER to take the salt out. The need for oil is still prevalent to do that job.

I wonder how the Salton Sea is doing these days. Haven't been there since 1967.....

Disappearing a little bit every year.

Whisky is for drinking
and water is for fighting over.

... allegedly said by Mark Twain

The land beneath the Great Lakes is supposed to keep “tilting” toward the south east which will eventually cause the water to drain away,
although some argue that there is a crack in the continent beneath Lake Superior that is too deep to ever drain completely.
One prior Great Lake is believed to have already drained away this way.

There have been massive long lasting droughts out West,
and they were not caused by man burning fossil fuels.

Elon Musk has a lesser known company called “The Boring Company” that wants to build parabolic subway transportation systems,
but could shift to building a tunnel between the Mississippi and Colorado watersheds.

The 30+ mile railroad tunnel in Switzerland shows what could be done.

I did a Masters at the University of Newcastle because the Mining School head there, Scottish Professor Potts, was the long time advocate for building a tunnel between England and Europe. Professor Potts also wanted to mine coal from Scotland out under the North Sea, then set up oil drilling rigs in the coal mines to drill down to the oil deposits deeper down.

China has been connecting its major rivers to send the water where some humans want it.

China intends to use its huge military tunnel systems to survive a Nuclear war that it will start.

Sap is the French word for a small mine or tunnel.
In English, a “Sapper” is a specially trained soldier who can use explosives, originally in tunnels to collapse castle walls.

Stable, honest, money used to be considered so important that only miners were allowed to mine a metal that would be used as money.

When we moved to the desert 25 years ago the water would splash over the spillways on a windy day at Hoover. Lake Mohave goes down every winter but is as normal as can be right now as they ramp it up for downstream agriculture every spring. Sooner than later they’re not going to be able to fill it.

https://www.thespectrum.com/story/n...t-more-natural-colorado-rive/9132210002/


There has also been talk of removing Glen Canyon Dam altogether


Just looked up Lake Mohave and it’s 93.7% full pool…..

https://mojaveproject.org/dispatches-item/the-trouble-with-cadiz/

Another interesting water grab that’s going on…..

I've driven by their, Cadiz, Amboy, Essex and the others on that route, many, many times on both the old route 66 and the new Hwy 40 freeway on the way to Needles, Searchlight, North Las Vegas, Kingman, Az and to Wiliams, AZ and the Grand Canyon from 29 Palms and Joshua Tree, CA

It really is down! I wonder what's been found over the years since the water went down.
I camped there when I was an 18 year old brat in1990,a bunch of college brats from California showed up with every toy imaginable. They got drunk every night and sunk a bunch of machinery in the lake. They lost a few quads, and a few motorcycles over the course of a weekend, mostly trying to see how far they could hydroplane stuff out over the water after a dozen or so beers. They had a collision and sunk one of the boats they had, no effort at all to retrieve any of it. At the end of the weekend they just drove off, left a bunch of tents, camping equipment, coolers with beer,liquor and food etc. We thought they would come back with all the stuff they left, but they never did, the park rangers came down and told us we could keep anything we wanted if we cleaned up their site, which we did.

California has the largest source of water - Pacific ocean !!! . . . why aren't they building desalination plants, utilizing all the "green energy" to power the plants and then pump the fresh water east ??? . . . reduce the draw on the Colorado watershed and let the lakes recover to some degree ??? . . . then be able to continue generating power from the dams . . .

In Israel, they knew they HAD to build the desalination plants in order to live !! . . . sure it costs $$$, but certainly better than having NO water . . . or water rationing . . .

Just my 2cents worth . . .

Cheers,

They can’t produce enough power now to keep themselves out of ‘brownouts’….now cars are consuming electricity.

They couldn't produce enough electricity to prevent brownouts before the cars started consuming electricity. The car sucking up electricity will just become an additional burden. The reason they can't produce clean fresh water or consistent electricity has nothing to do with cost, or technology, its caused by stupid people, both in the government and out of it.

How much clean lake water is consumed every year fighting forest fires. Couldn’t sea water at least be pumped inland for jobs like this.

Salt water kills most vegetation

I figured that but I thought some engineer could come up with a procedure through filtering and dilution so it could become usable and even if they cut down on say 30% of clean water usage it would have to help.

THEN there’s less to catch FIRE

They actually use very little water for fighting fires, more building of fire breaks, fire retardant, back fires... and when water is used it is taken from the nearest source, when the forest service intentionally made a 20 acre lightning fire into a 40,000 acre intentional fire next door to my house last summer they were scooping water between 1/10th and 1/2 mile away, it would take unimaginable resources to build a pool of ocean water reserves even every mile or so everywhere there might be a fire someday.

And the ecosystem goes to hell.

No….dry dead vegetation becomes an even greater fire hazard.

I see cost this, cost this on every project but Switzerland is spending over one million dollars per mile to install charging grids in the pavement to charge cars while driving. Lobbyist are already getting geared up to do this in the United States

Like it was before humans got there

I always wondered why they don't pipe that seawater through the Rockies into some Arizona/Utah/New Mexico deserts or into the Cali deserts and into large sealed retention ponds.

Let the sun do the work and ship the salt back to the ocean or sell it.

Salt is way too plentiful and cheap to need to do that, it is very cheaply mined or evaporated near oceans to bother with that.

I was thinking more about capturing the water using the sun as power for the desalination process.

I guess I wasn't to clear.

In large quantities that water could prove valuable and I believe that gravity would take it to the desert with little pumping required.

It may still be too costly.

He's talking about evaporating out the water in a sealed system to collect it for freshwater use and selling the salt as a byproduct.

You do understand that if you dig a depression for a pond in the desert, and fill it with salt water from the ocean, that the water will evaporate from the heat and dry air, and you will be left with a depression that used to be a pond that will be full of salt with little or no water, right?

The concept of removing the salt from ocean water is to provide fresh water for the cities along the ocean. If they did just that, and capped off the locations where they are currently pulling the water from the Colorado river basin to supply fresh water to those cities, it would probably solve both problems in a few of years.

Not building cities in the desert in the first place would have been the best correct response, but we are way past that point now.

I was thinking more about capturing the water. Sealing / Covering the ponds to catch the evaporated water but using the sun as power for the desalination process.

I guess I wasn't too clear. Sorry about that.

Actually….. here’s your salt answer

https://californiawithyou.com/2021/01/10/amboy-salt-flats-amboy-california/

I’ve spent many a day exploring in the Mojave

A large prize should be offered for the best idea or new invention on how to get more fresh water into the Colorado watershed.

Big prize, $ Billion or more.

I started going to Powell in 1971. I was there in 1980 when it was filled. I was there in 1983 when they over filler it. It has been dropping ever since. I was there last year. Here is a shot of the Bullfrog boat ramp. This ramp is over 1/4 mile long. As of right now no boats in or out of the water.
The Colorado River goes through my town and I don't think Powell or Mead will ever be full again.
In the 2nd pic you can see where the water should be.

I don't think that people realize just how bad it is. It is going to get really ugly soon.

Hence my question about desalination plants along the west coast to provide the water that is being drawn out of Colorado river . . .

The natural flow of the Colorado river should be around 20,000 cubic feet per second

The Columbia river dumps 265,000 cubic feet per second of fresh water into the ocean! Over 10 times what the un-interrupted flow of the Colorado should be!

My idea is the best and everyone else's is terrible! (just kidding) but honestly they do not need to pump much, just dump a small portion of the Columbia into a pipe near Portland, lay 1000 miles of pipe on the ocean floor to LA with no tunneling needed and very minimal disturbance to any ecosystems and if there is a leak big stinking deal as that fresh water was just about to end up in the ocean anyhow. The only pumping needed would be to pump it out of the southern end of the pipe into the LA water plant or a reservoir or something. If you try to get it from the other side of the Rockies you will need at least 1500 miles of pipe, drilling through mountains and under or over roads, securing right of ways, pumping it up hill several thousand feet takes a lot of energy, that's how we make so much energy damming it up and letting it fall a couple hundred feet. This plan frees up the portion of Colorado river water going to southern California cities so Phoenix and Vegas can have more, heck we could probably get Mexico to chip in some of the cost if we let some more of the Colorado flow into Mexico.

How deep are water wells out there. Do many use well water for survival. I haven’t paid a water bill since 1984.

There are wells just depends where you are. Take Nevada. Las Vegas get pretty much all their drinking water from Lake Mead. 60 miles to the west in Pahrump it is 100% ground water. Most all the farm land in the California Center Valley is feed with ground water. Been sucking the aquifer dry for decades. Guess they are down to 2500' there now. Now the ground is settling 10-20 feet.
They are wanting to drill more aqua ducts to take even more water from the west side to the east side to feed Denver and the Front Range. Here in the Colorado River District we are fighting with both Denver and all the states down stream for water.

This actually one of the best ideas that I've heard.

I remember reading, back in the mid-80's, an article that quoted an engineer from the Bureau of Reclamation. This was only a few years after Powell had reached full pool, which took a remarkable 17 years. His position was that Lake Powell was going to be the death knell for Lake Mead, because Powell would lose such a large quantity of water to evaporation. It's now believed that Powell loses 860,000 acre/ft per year to evaporation, far more than was previously thought.
Now, up here in Canada, we have a band of usual suspects that like to blather on that the Americans want to take our water. The usual tale is that they want to pump it out of the Great Lakes and ship it to the dry Southwest. These people are usually geographically challenged. Most of where the water needs to go is not only a couple thousand miles away from the Great Lakes, it's a couple thousand feet up. Meanwhile, Canada sends about 200,000 cu/ft per second of clean fresh water across the border via the Columbia. If the need was really serious, you could pull 25-50,000 cu/ft per second out of the Columbia, east of Umatilla, and pump it downhill to the Salton Sea. Use that strictly for irrigation for a decade, and the Salton would be cleaned up dramatically. But, we're talking huge dollars.

I wonder if there is a map somewhere showing the aquifers underground in the Western USA?

Is there a soft, easy to bore through, rock layer aquifer
that is both underneath the main channel of the Missouri River and outcrops somewhere inside the Colorado River watershed?

There are volcanic ash layers in the West that stretch over vast areas, from Yellowstone and other volcanoes.
Some ash layers contain “rare earth metals” that are needed for today’s high output DC motors.

I wonder if you could “kill two birds with one stone”
by mining a layer of rare earth ore from the Missouri to Colorado watersheds.

In the 1990s I bought pure samples of each of the Rare Earth metals from the Mountain Pass, CA mine near the NV border.
The rocks there at Mountain Pass also contain Uranium and Thorium.

What needs to happen is population control. Too many people, too much demand on the existing water supply.

It’s not your idea, it’s been talked about for many years.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...california-columbia-2015apr10-story.html

This viewpoint is always spoken by people that could pull the plug on themselves and get the trend moving.
They never do. They often think that they are the superior ones and that others should just die off.
Bill Gates is one of these assclowns.

You can't have a planet with all land used for living/working/industry/food production.
If diseases/famine/wars/disasters were all eliminated, human population would grow like algae in a stagnant pond,.
The Well-Off survive nicely because the Not-So-Well-Off don't: it's a balancing act.

How many humans can the earth support?
Will water, food, space or warfare be the limiting factor?

How much crude oil, natural gas, or coal can humans extract from the earth at reasonable cost?

Algae store Omega-3 oils to use as food when the sun is not shining.
There is A LOT of algae in the oceans, lakes and rivers.
What percent of the total algae would humans have to collect and squeeze to provide enough oil to power all of human civilization?
What should be done with the non oil leftover body parts of that fraction of the algae?

Long long ago blue-green algae started turning sunlight into food,
left solid wastes as distinctly looking rock (Stromatolites)
and let loose a gaseous waste (Oxygen) too,
which started a whopper of “climate change”.

Has human caused “climate change”
got any where close to algae caused climate change?

Algae creating stromatolites rock mounds are still alive today,
but just in spotty unique places.
Should we search these algae out,
and kill them for their past climate “sins” ?

Hmmmm - could algae be tricked into transferring water to the Colorado watershed?

I'm fine with someone thinking of it first but I did come up with it on my own when I saw the columbia river outlet in person back in 2013 when I went to portland for a 24 hours of lemons race, I though my goodness that is a lotawata dumping in the ocean, they should pipe it down to the dessert.

I've seen the Columbia River and it is huge. More like the Mississippi and the Missouri River. Not the little drainage ditch we call the Colorado River. Just amazes me that over 30 million people rely on that little trickle. What ever they do is going to require buttloads of money.

Everyday we waste money on pet projects. Let’s spend some on our country because we all would benefit.

Any farther comments from me would move this topic to the unmoderated section. I kind of wish it would be moved there, I have a lot of stuff I would like to comment on, but I will not be the guy that gets it moved.

I had not pondered anything but diverting Missouri River water to the Colorado Watershed.

Assuming you need at least 200 feet of elevation drop to avoid pumping,
at what spot is one of the many rivers of the Columbia River Watershed
200 feet above either Lake Powell or Lake Mead’s elevation?

Perhaps the Northern section of a Western USA water diversion
should be a “Y”
with one leg running to the Columbia watershed, and another leg running to the Missouri watershed.

Thinking again about rock aquifers underground that already exist due to nature,
one leg of the Y should run to a rock aquifer that can be fed from the Columbia
and the other leg of the Y should run to a rock aquifer that can be fed from the Missouri.

Aquifer water reduces the chances of the Colorado getting unwanted life, like the Chinese Carp, etc.

Most of the Columbia river water talk is about a pipeline.it would have to be huge, would cost many billions, and would involve hundreds of lawsuits. Theoretically possible, not so sure that it’s practically possible.

I live on the Naches River, which drains into the Yakima River, which drains into the Columbia. So if they build the pipeline I could theoretically toss a rubber duck out my backyard and it would go to some farmer’s field in California!

There was talk about piping Columbia River water through a pipe in the Pacific Ocean to SO CA back in the 1970s, to many environmentalists started screaming and protesting and threatening lawsuits so it got drop.
I have to cross the Columbia River to go to Washington to visit family or go racing up there, it is big and carries a lot of water into the ocean I'm not sure how much of the water in the Columbia drains out of Canada, I know a lot of the water in the Columbia drains out of Idaho, Washington and Oregon.
The Snake River Gorge reminds me of the Grand Canyon, not as long or probably not as deep either
The power of water flowing

Columbia starts up in British Columbia and flows south . . .

A large nuclear powered boat should fill up with Columbia river water and transport it down to California.

USA will soon retire a entire class of nuclear powered Aircraft Carriers....

Russia has a fleet of Nuclear powered Ice Breakers,
and at least one “floating Nuclear Power Plant”

Well here is something on the desalination front :

https://www.designboom.com/technolo...n-unit-generates-clean-water-04-29-2022/

Can be solar powered !!! . . . there it is, time to ramp up the scale and start sucking up the pacific for the parched California areas . . .

Lake Mead is giving up some secrets

Vegas is right next door.... probably not the only weighted swimmer in that lake.

Old home foundations isn't apparently the only findings going on out there.

“Barrel washed up on shore”…. I think she got that wrong

….believe they found another body before this one.

https://kutv.com/news/local/utah-lawmakers-to-study-pipeline-from-pacific-ocean-to-great-salt-lake

maybe Hoffa will surface

Anyone ever check out molten salt solar installations? For generating power it's a stupid idea, but I wonder if the same principal could be used for desalination. Boil salt water with concentrated sun light. Not like we don't have deserts right on the ocean.

Environmentalist are already pissed about that type of facility. Birds fly through the "hot zone" and get roasted in flight.

Kinda like getting killed by windmills, only different. Lol

Yep... everything has a potentially inherent hazard. Youtube, I think, has some videos of cooking birds in flight...

Yep. Just south of Vegas.

Excellent idea. This will piss off the environmentalists though....You tell them that using sea water will offset any rise in ocean levels and watch their heads explode!

Hey !! Never thought of that !!! Of course, solve 2 problems at same time !!! . . .

Ivanpah solar generating station….. lots of interesting reading on that folly .

Not sure I agree with this article about Beef cattle and shortages of Colorado River water:

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-water-alfalfa-dairy-beef-meat

Not sure I agree with recent hour long PBS TV show claiming
it takes 10 gallons of California irrigation water
to grow 10 single tiny almonds,
and that 8 of those almonds are then exported out of the USA to foreign countries.

https://www.riversendfilm.com/

I am confident that it would be a good idea to offer a
$5,000,000 prize
for best plan to transport seasonal excess flow Missouri River water
through underground porous rock layers
to the Colorado River watershed.

Start of such a plan would be a prize of $100,000 to get amateur geologists
to search & identify a natural water spring somewhere in the Colorado Watershed
whose spring water can be somehow traced to a source in the Missouri & its Tributary rivers watersheds.

Might be worth similar prizes to get Columbia River water through porous rock layers to Colorado watershed.

Years ago, pre 1980, CA wanted to build a large undersea water pipe from the end of Columbia river down into northern CA for more fresh water,
Both Oregon and Washinton told them to go pound sand
I'm surprised that CA hasn't already built a water pipe, canal, conduit from the exit of the Roque and Klamath Rivers to capture that water flowing into the Pacific Ocean in southern Oregon

The unfortunate reality is that Los Angeles is a desert but people don’t treat it like one. They wanted to divert the Sacramento River to Southern California a few years back.

Thye built that canal and water storage lakes in the late 1960s and finish it in early 1970s. They called it the Feather River Project L.A. started importing water from the Ownes valley on the east side of the Seirra Mtns. in the early 1900s, they also built several different canals form the Colorado river into L.A. before the 1950, one from Lake Havasu and another from the border of the U.S. and Mexico that they named the All American canal
The L.A. Basin was home to many large citrus groves and many other types of produce in the 1900 up to the early to mid 1940s when the invaders from all the other states in our country started moving there for the better weather and living conditions, now it is commercial development and housing tracts from the Pacific Ocean to the mountain passes leading out into the Mojave Desert

So the question is this: is lake Powell 70% empty, or is it 30% full?

The answer is that since it is a man made lake it is returning to it's natural state.

are you saying original state or natural man made state lake?

Meaning that it wasn't a lake so it shouldn't have water in it.

That is an oxymoron.

Last night I watched the PBS “Wild Rivers with Tillie” episode on Glen Canyon “river” that has emerged from the dropping lake level.

In 1980 I rafted the Colorado when river water flow and lake levels were near max, and the then permitted use of 5 HP maximum, extra muffled, gasoline outboard motors was about to be banned a few months in the future.

Great trip, great devout Mormon river guides, great food, hair-raising end of trip helicopter ride out of the canyon using the “hot air thermals” to gain altitude by being VERY close to the sunny side canyon walls.

Guides refused to let me swim on purpose 100% of Lava Falls ( like Robert Kennedy did) but admitted there was a real chance everyone in some of the rafts would end up swimming half of it. Guides ended my protests by saying: You may be needed to save your Mom & Dad’s lives if we flip.

Then was guilty of further “climate warming sin” by attending the Mining Convention in Los Vegas.

Won net $5000 at Roulette using the “Martindale betting system”, but had to “cover” one $8000 spin. Heartbeat rate was racing, and I have had a heart defect since birth.

Wasted Youth

Drove over the Mississippi river bridge in Hannibal, MO today, we have some MASSIVE flooding here from the snow melt, the river was down 60% early this year, no barge traffic going down it, now the same thing for the opposite reason! I guess to keep you clowns in the west happy we will need to divert the Mississippi your way, huh?

Jim you know that I'm already a happy clown.

I don't consider you "out west", don't have to go to much further west to find the clowns though...

Well dam.

I don't see how it would negatively affect washington or oregon once they get a little cash kickback for it being off their coast a little ways. The columbia makes far more sense than the missouri or mississippi, it could all be under the sea, wildlife can swim over or under it so basically no affect on that, a leak is just gonna put fresh water in the ocean that was already going in the ocean, pumping would be far simpler, you could run a 10 foot pipe with as much pumping as it can handle and it will not noticably affect the fresh water dumping into the ocean.

They were recently wanting a pipeline from the great lakes, they were given the same 1 finger salute

How would that even be possible, given the continental divide???

Pump stations.

i'm way east, but i was a "class clown" in school. does that count for anything ?

I think I sat behind you. Lol 😂.

Here in Colorado there are already 4 aqua ducts going under the Divide taking water from the west side and feeding the east side. City of Denver gets 50% of their water from the west side. Anything is possible if you throw enough money at it.

Nothing will be done for free or little payback, Tesla comes to mind (AC electricity man) free energy for mankind, then he just ‘died’ guess who got all his papers.. the feds.
If californication said they’re give $10 a gallon Oregon starts the pipeline tomorrow.

Isn't the west side of Colorado a lot higher than Denver and east of Denver?
Doesn't water flow downhill naturedly

The truly crazy history is that the city of Denver has created 3 tunnels through the mountains to bring Colorado watershed water to their city where it is eventually discharged into the S Platte river which then drains into the Missouri watershed and then Mississippi watershed. Denver makes floods in New Orleans worse.

Half-American Winston Churchill said:
“you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, but only after they have tried many wrong things.”

I watched the “Rivers End” film,
and learned some interesting stuff about Western USA water issues,
but the somewhat long article below
has stuff the Rivers End film makers must have known,
but intentionally left out:

Why California Insists on Wasting Its Scarce Water Supply
Edward Ring
Harvesting its abundant storm runoff would allow the state to leave the Colorado River alone.

May 5, 2023 5:34 pm ET

With the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, drawn down to historic lows, the seven states that use water from the Colorado River have failed to agree on how to adapt to its dwindling flow. The impasse pits California against everyone else. If California’s political leaders had the political will, they could solve the problem for every member of the Colorado River Compact by developing infrastructure to use untapped sources of water. But to do that, the state Legislature would have to stand up to a powerful environmentalist lobby that views humans as parasites and demands rationing as the only acceptable policy.

Unlike anywhere else in the American Southwest, California can rely on so-called atmospheric rivers that saturate the state with enough rain to supply the state’s farms and cities with adequate water. Even in drought years, these storms blow in from the Pacific, hit the ramparts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and dump tens of millions of acre-feet of runoff into the streams and rivers. Californians can, and must, agree on new infrastructure solutions that will safely harvest more of this water for human consumption.

The Colorado crisis underscores California’s grotesque failure to upgrade its water infrastructure for the 21st century. Since 1980, Californians have endured five droughts, and politicians are predicting worse in the future. With groundwater aquifers dangerously depleted and access to Colorado River water imperiled, rationing won’t be enough.

It isn’t as if water abundance isn’t possible in California. The state’s 2021-22 water season recorded some of the lowest total precipitation ever. But in a single month, December 2021, well over 100 million acre-feet of rain fell during the one big storm that hit the state that year. If California had the capacity to capture more of that water, it would have been enough to supply full allocations to Golden State farmers and avoid rationing in cities. As it is, during this current water season, one of the wettest on record, politicians continue to warn Californians that “the drought isn’t over.”

There are two major projects that could unlock millions of acre-feet of new water for Californians. The first is to eliminate nutrient pollution in the San Francisco Bay, which feeds toxic algae blooms that kill aquatic life. The solution so far has been to dilute the nutrient loads in the bay by requiring massive diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta—a little like flushing a toilet. But upgrading the urban wastewater-treatment facilities surrounding the bay would eliminate nutrient pollution, permitting more delta water to be directed to California’s farms and cities—a lot more water.

This rainy season started in October 2022. By the first day of spring, March 21, the net outflow (after pumping) from the delta into the bay was 11.6 million acre-feet but the state had only pumped 1 million acre-feet into the California Aqueduct, and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation had only pumped 826,000 acre-feet into the Delta-Mendota Canal. Despite record precipitation, the state had diverted only 13% of flood-level delta outflows into southbound aqueducts.

In late March and early April, as rain continued to pour in California and the biggest snowpack in decades began to melt, California’s water officials actually reduced pumping. Their reason? To protect endangered fish and maintain sufficient flow to flush out the nutrient pollution in the San Francisco Bay.

Even in a year with extraordinary rain and snow, California’s environmental extremists have done their utmost to prevent water managers from filling reservoirs, allow pumps to operate at capacity to fill the southbound aqueducts, and allow farmers to get their full water allocations so they can use runoff to irrigate instead of pumping already depleted groundwater. But even if California’s state government weren’t dominated by extremists, California’s water infrastructure would be stretched to the limit.

The second major project, then, would be for Californians to build new ways to extract and store water from the delta during atmospheric river events. A new technique, already demonstrated on the Tuolumne River, creates channels in some of the delta islands so that huge perforated pipes can be installed under a gravel bed. Fish aren’t endangered by such installations. This water could be rapidly transferred to aquifers south of the delta via surface percolation and deep injection. Unused aquifer capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at more than 50 million acre feet.

If Californians were willing to harvest additional millions of acre-feet from storm runoff in the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed, and had the means to do so, they might not need any water from the Colorado River. This is how California can give back not only its share of Colorado River water, but cover its annual deficit of 2 million to 4 million acre-feet. Other states in the Colorado Basin might help fund these projects. Thinking big solves big problems. It’s time for California’s state Legislature permanently to solve the challenge of water scarcity in the American Southwest.

Mr. Ring cofounded the California Policy Center in 2013,
served as its first president,
and is a senior fellow.
He is the author of “The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California.”