My grandfather once told me a fascinating tale. He learned as a youngster that the Southwest’s desert was actually rather dry. He recalls asking his father, whom I had the good fortune to know somewhat when I was a child, how all the new residents were going to receive their water. That’s a hell of a question coming from a kid in the late 1930s, yet my grandfather is still as sharp as a tack at over 90 years old, suggesting that he’s always been smart.
Generations of politicians, engineers, and voters have been debating how to solve this issue for the better part of a century. Unfortunately, most of the innovative thinking took place at a period of record Colorado River flows, which resulted in everyone having a piece of a large pie that has since shrunk. But drawing water from the powerful Colorado helped help residents of Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona with a number of issues.
CERTAIN CURRENT WATER PROJECTS Here are some noteworthy water projects we should consider while considering the Colorado River, some of which I’ve written about quite a bit over the past couple of years.
The Colorado River Aqueduct project is likely the most well-known. People in southern California have access to clean, fresh water because to this system, which originates in Lake Havasu on the Arizona-California state line. It travels about 250 miles across challenging terrain carrying that water, which necessitates numerous pumps, canals, and filters to function. Given the size of the undertaking, the American Society of Civil Engineers named it one of the Seven Engineering Wonders of American Engineering in 1955.
The Central Arizona Project is a significant project that transports water from the Colorado. This canal travels east to the Phoenix urban region and Tucson from the same lake where California’s straw originates. This 336-mile canal system was more difficult to engineer than any other because it was intended to extend into areas of New Mexico, but it might have ended up being even longer. To pump the water up to the 2900-foot elevation needed to supply it throughout Arizona, the system consumes 2.5 million megawatt-hours of power yearly.
However, some water from the Colorado did eventually reach New Mexico. Water that would have ended up in the Colorado is now transported by the San Juan-Chama Project from a Colorado tributary to a Rio Grande tributary, reaching cities like Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and numerous more small villages.
Without the dams, none of these projects (or other, lesser diversion projects) would be possible. Both the Hoover Dam and the Glen Canyon Dam serve to keep Lake Mead and Lake Powell from filling up with water. As you’ve probably heard, with everything from World War II era boats to the bodies of Las Vegas mob victims in barrels appearing in Lake Mead , both of these reservoirs are running low.
USING CURRENT SYSTEMS MAKES MORE SENSE Although building desalination plants along the coast and pumping the water through enormous pipes throughout the Southwest would be fantastic, it would be a huge undertaking. People would prefer dump water from the Mississippi River into the Colorado River than devise plans to obtain even more water.
This might seem to make sense at first. Adding more water to the Colorado River would enable everyone to continue doing what they are now doing despite the absurd sums of money the United States has already spent preparing to move water from the river. You would end up with a number of sizable reservoirs that could be filled to supply water to everyone who received so much water from the Colorado in the past when the Colorado had stronger flows if the water were added somewhere upstream of Lake Powell.
NOTHING IS TOO DIFFICULT TO DISAGREE ABOUT It’s not at all simple to transport such a large amount of water from the Mississippi River to Colorado, though. Such a project would dwarf all current projects in terms of distance, water volume, and topography. It would result in a project that would go down in history as a new engineering marvel. It would be absurd to finance all of that construction and then the operations.
But like anything in politics, the task’s apparent impossibility doesn’t stop people from debating it. A letter that was just sent to the editor of the Desert Sun, a newspaper published in arid California, expresses the feelings that surround this issue . The author of the letter expresses shock at the opposition such a project would face in the Midwest, where the water would originate, and then suggests that California simply pump desalinated water from the ocean so the state is not dependent on the Midwest for anything.
Therefore, kindly keep your filthy water. We should use our state governments to resolve this. But keep in mind that if you ever need our help again, it will come around again. I wouldn’t wait impatiently for a response. Our phone number might be off the list. says the author.
NECESSARILY NEITHER PROJECT SEEMS LIKELY The issue with both arguments is that neither project appears to be particularly realistic, making it absurd for folks who live on the ocean and those who live in flyover country to be at odds about it. We should learn to live with not only giving each other the things we need, but also doing better at not needing as much, because people in the US need each other more than we need to be fighting with each other.
Desalination or pumping Mississippi water to western regions would be prohibitively expensive and not worth considering while there are still alternative options available. On Google Earth or Google Maps, one of the main issues may be seen from the air. In western cities, there is just too much greenery that serves only as decoration. People relocated to the desert and then wanted to act as though they didn’t do so.
Arguments over megaprojects may make sense if we reach a point where there is nothing better to do than make do with water, but for now, we really need to be concentrating on other issues. Perhaps most crucially, we need to concentrate on preventing unchecked climate change from making this issue worse.
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