INTRIGUING IDEA FOR MORE WATER

2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #320

Most any time I face a problem I look for as many viable options as I can find for a resolution. And recently a good friend of mine came up with an intriguing idea to bring more water to Southern California. He began by saying, reasonably enough, that we should take water from where it is plentiful and move it to places where it is not. So then he asked me if I was familiar with Ketchikan, Alaska, where it usually has between 140 and 160 inches of rain per year. Yes, I have been there, and it is a city on the southernmost entrance to Alaska’s famed Inside Passage and, since it has cliffs totally surrounding its landward side, the only way to get there is either by air or by sea. Well, my friend says, since our country is so good at building pipelines, if we could somehow capture that rainwater before it is dumped into the sound, we could pipe it under the ocean to the aquifers in places like California’s Central Valley. All we would really have to do is build a dam on a canyon near the ocean and put a large pipe at the bottom. Depending upon which canyon the dam was built upon, it would not have an adverse effect upon the city and, since a strainer would be built over the intake piping, little if any negative effect on the environment. And the water could be gravity flowed until we would be forced to pump it over the hills into the Central Valley so, once the pipeline was built, the water would not be that expensive.

Of course, I have no expertise or background regarding possibilities like this but, I think you would agree, the idea is intriguing. (And it certainly is different!) Ketchikan or at least Alaska would probably be paid some amount of money for the transfer of their water; Ketchikan would get a new lake, with all of the benefits involved; and Southern California would get a fair amount of water for a reasonably minimal cost. Does anyone in our 2 Paragraphs Family know some engineer who could explore this idea? The more I think about it, the more it sounds like a winner.

Thought for the week: “Nobody comes out second-best in their autobiography.”