[IROC]

I read a good discussion on this not long ago. It is a real and very big problem. Thru climate change, the western part of the country is getting drier and the eastern part of the country is getting wetter (in the last couple of months they revised our yearly rainfall average here in East Tennessee and raised it by 4").

Lake Mead was last considered "full" in 2000. It is now 143 FEET below that level. This impacts municipal water supplies, irrigation, the ability to produce power, etc. - not just recreation/tourism. It is "low" by about 5.5 trillion gallons.

One idea that I have read about is a national water grid. Basically a system of piping and pumps to distribute water around the country as needed. Essentially moving water from areas of high rainfall (the east) to areas of low rainfall (the west) or more specifically in this case moving water from the Mississippi River to the Colorado River. When I first read about it I thought 'there's no way'... But, that solution is not a technical or economical problem - it's political/environmental. One study found that the cost to build the system would be less than the recovery efforts from one large Mississippi River basin flood. And... we can certainly build large pipelines over long distances - like the Alaska pipeline (80 million gallons/day at it peak). Unfortunately I just did the math and at 80 million gallons/day it would take 188 years to bring Lake Mead back to full pool. (maybe my Alaska pipeline example isn't representative of pipeline volumes...). Just to ramble, when I worked at Browns Ferry NP, each unit took in 660,000 gpm of cooling water from Wheeler Reservoir during operation. Using this number instead, it would take 16 years to bring it back to full pool.

But...I think it would be mired in arguments over water rights, environmental impacts of pipeline building and movement of invasive species, etc.

I think, though, that it is not inconceivable that as this plays out, the infrastructure in the west is going to increasingly fail to support the needs of the population out there and then the whole country is going to have to deal with this one way or another.