Send Mississippi River water to southwestern reservoirs? New analysis casts doubts.

As an environmental scientist, Roger Viadero needed to scratch his head over information reviews final summer season of the thirsty demand in Palm Springs and Las Vegas, amongst different western cities, for water from the Mississippi River and the Nice Lakes.

The letters pages of the Palm Springs Desert Solar newspaper broke their very own information for on-line site visitors final June with readers’ proposals to siphon some 22 billion gallons of water per day from the Midwest. To resolve the Southwest’s water disaster, the desert denizens wrote, a sequence of canals and reservoirs might pipe water from the flood-prone Mississippi River to the Colorado River, a supposed win-win for everybody.

Aqueducts, pipelines and open channels pumping water from Minnesota and thereabouts to drier climates might simply do the trick, in keeping with the letter writers. “We might fill Lake Powell in lower than a yr with an aqueduct from (the) Mississippi River,” wrote a reader. “It’s about will,” wrote one other.

The proposals provoked Viadero, a skeptic and board-certified environmental engineer, to take up their feasibility together with his college students at Western Illinois College, the place he chairs the environmental science doctorate program from the college’s Moline campus, situated alongside the Mississippi River close to the state’s Iowa border.

“The thought we’ve got this abundance of water, it’s only a fantasy,” mentioned Viadero, director of the college’s Institute for Environmental Research, pointing to extreme drought and low Midwestern water ranges in an interview Monday.

“We despatched astronauts to the moon,” he added. “We didn’t ship the moon to us. Folks say every kind of issues about what they heard on Fb. … We’re attempting to provide them some instruments to assist individuals make choices.”

‘PHYSICAL, ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL MAGNITUDE’

On Oct. 17, he and two doctoral college students — E. Dave Thomas and Samuel Babatunde — launched a 21-page technical evaluation of the “bodily, financial and environmental magnitude” of doubtless diverting trillions of gallons of water from the Mississippi River to the decrease Colorado River.

They introduced their white paper two days later on the Higher Mississippi River Convention, which was held in Moline, and hope to have it peer-reviewed and printed in a tutorial journal.

“We observed a lack of awareness that can be utilized by the general public to weigh the sensible facets of those proposals,” wrote the scientists. “This has created a void that’s being crammed by proposals that lack real looking objectives, violate a lot of bodily legal guidelines, and convey a poor understanding of scale, amongst different points.”

Their findings, in a nutshell?

“Time, area, ecology, finances, and politics aren’t on the aspect” of water diverters, they wrote.

20 YEARS OF DROUGHT

The researchers famous there’s nothing hypothetical concerning the 20-plus years of drought which have plagued the Colorado River, which travels by way of seven U.S. states, offers ingesting water for roughly 1-in-10 People and irrigates the overwhelming majority of the nation’s winter greens.

Beneath Lake Powell in northern Arizona, the decrease Colorado winds by way of Nevada, Arizona and California into Mexico, watering Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles and San Diego on its method.

In 2012, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation gave the potential for diverting Mississippi River water westward critical consideration, calling it on the time a possible 30-year mission. The Arizona state legislature petitioned Congress in 2021 to revisit the concept, and on June 26, a letter within the Desert Solar went viral for suggesting utilizing the river water to replenish Lake Powell, a reservoir in Utah and Arizona, in addition to Lake Mead, one other drought-stricken reservoir in Nevada and Arizona.

Collectively, the 2 reservoirs are about 27 p.c full, or some 13 trillion gallons wanting capability, and sinking quick.

Nonetheless, the 2012 drought that hit each the higher and decrease Mississippi River basins was much more extreme — although much less long-lasting — than the continuing drought alongside the Colorado River basins, in keeping with the scientists.

Drought situations have continued to impression river communities from Minnesota on down by way of Tennessee and Mississippi. Previously few weeks alone, low water ranges have clogged Mississippi River barge site visitors, impacting each recreation and nationwide commerce, together with corn provides.

“The severity of dry situations has turn out to be worse over time,” the scientists wrote. “Given the size and geographic extent of those dry situations, it’s unlikely that this may abate underneath pure circumstances.”

21.6 BILLION GALLONS DAILY

Refilling Lake Mead and Lake Powell in lower than two years, as Desert Solar readers urged, would require shifting 21.6 billion gallons of water per day — sufficient water to fill the Washington Monument 2,600 instances each day.

Inspecting discharge charges by Vicksburg, Miss., the scientists discovered that diverting some 250,000 gallons of Mississippi River water per second would cut back the typical downstream circulate by roughly 8 p.c, or by 5.6 p.c throughout flooding situations and by 17 p.c in comparison with intervals of low water discharge.

The scientists scoffed at options that might save taxpayers cash by decreasing the necessity to construct and preserve flood levees and different infrastructure alongside the Mississippi River and its main tributaries. They famous that in 2019, the impression of flooding within the Midwest and southern plains was estimated at $20 billion in flood response, reconstruction and restoration, amongst different losses.

Even when the diverted river water was valued at only a penny per gallon, the associated fee to fill each lakes would complete at the very least $134.8 billion, or 6.7 instances the price of the response to the basin-wide Mississippi River flooding three years in the past.

And people totals don’t embody the added prices to accumulate land, design and assemble a conveyance system, deal with the water and supply for annual operation and upkeep.

A LONG CHANNEL OR A BIG PIPE UPHILL

What sort of system might transport that a lot water? An open channel must be 100 ft extensive and 61 ft deep, or 1,000 ft extensive and 6 ft deep, stretching throughout a large swathe of the U.S., in keeping with the scientists.

That channel would span the width of an interstate freeway, if not 10, and require heavy political buy-in from the cities and states alongside some 1,200 to 1,600 miles of future river freeway. Development would require some 1.9 billion yards of excavated materials for the channel alone, not together with its basis.

Utilizing a closed pipe as an alternative of an open channel would lead to a construction 88 ft in diameter — concerning the size throughout of 1 1/2 semi-trailers.

Then there’s the query of crossing the mountainous continental divide. The elevation distinction between Lake Powell and the Previous River Management Construction, the Mississippi River floodgate system in central Louisiana, is about 4,600 ft. The utmost elevation is 11,000 ft some 12 miles east of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Whereas the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers instructions highly effective pumps, “their elevate capabilities are comparatively low,” wrote the scientists.

ADVERSE EFFECTS

The report additionally touched briefly upon questions past engineering, together with the chance that invasive species equivalent to silver and bighead carp might journey westward from the Midwest and its tributaries.

On common, the focus of nitrogen in Mississippi River water is 6.8 instances larger than the focus in Lake Mead. At a charge of 250,000 gallons per second, some 69 million lbs. of nitrogen could be despatched westward over the course of 1 and a half years, seemingly requiring expensive added remedy.

Whereas the scientists didn’t dwell on political concerns, they famous {that a} Colorado River Compact relationship to 1922 divides water allocation by basin, not by state, additional complicating political questions round water entry.

Each the state of Minnesota and particular person communities equivalent to Dakota County have crafted legal guidelines in opposition to eradicating huge a great deal of groundwater for non-emergency, business and out-of-state use.