Arizona and much of the West are dealing with drought and have been for years. Meanwhile, other parts of the country, especially on the East Coast, are facing flooding. So, why can’t there be a solution to this seeming mismatch of too much rain in places that can’t handle it and not enough rain in places that really need it?
Alex Hager, reporter at KUNC in Colorado, joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Hey, Alex.
ALEX HAGER: Good morning, Mark.
BRODIE: So like how big of a topic of conversation is this in the water world of the fact that you know, there are places on the East Coast, especially after these two recent huge hurricanes that are facing terrible flooding and us here in the West don't have nearly enough water.
HAGER: Yeah, it is one that does not go away because it is such a tantalizingly simple solution. This topic is something that I would get a ton of emails about. Even before I ever published this story, I had random people on the internet asking me whether this was a feasible project. I had my own mother asking me whether this was a feasible project. People want to know about it because it seems like it would make sense. But in the halls of power for Western water, there is not a lot of conversation about actually bringing this to reality.
BRODIE: All right. So the main focus of your reporting was the idea of a pipeline, right? Like we have water pipelines, we have gas pipelines and oil pipelines. So it seems like that might be the most feasible solution. But as you reported, there are some pretty significant challenges to making that happen first. And one of the big ones is like, how would it actually happen? Like who would you even try to get the permission from, to build this thing?
HAGER: The political infrastructure to bring this to reality is, is kind of not there, water in the west and to an extent in the east is, is managed by this kind of patchwork of different agencies, different towns and counties and farm districts. And there is no central water agency oftentimes for a state and there's definitely no central water agency at the federal level. So if a Western entity wanted to go and get water from quote unquote “the East,” they wouldn't really have anyone to go to. There's no one there who could just kind of sell off the water.
And even if they did have an agency to hand away water from East of here, there is not a lot of likelihood that they would want to anywhere in the Mississippi River basin, which is a sprawling network of rivers that goes from, you know, Montana to Pittsburgh. It basically, you know, the, the water they have there, they need for farms and for cities and for boating and for birds and fish and they might not necessarily be willing to give it away because believe it or not, they have their own droughts too.
BRODIE: So, another big challenge and I think this might be the most obvious one is money, right? Like this would be ridiculously expensive to build.
HAGER: Yeah, experts I talked to said this project would be so expensive that it wouldn't be worth it because we could spend that money more effectively elsewhere. It is hard to put a number on this just because kind of nothing of this scale has really been attempted. It would be a lot of distance of either canal or pipeline and it would be moving uphill and water is incredibly heavy. It takes a lot of water to flow onto farm fields or into a city to be useful. And that amount of water would require a ton of energy to pump against the force of gravity.
It probably is too expensive to make sense. And that is even with billions of dollars from the federal government and more money from the state governments focused on fixing the supply demand, water imbalance. But experts are saying we already know of cheaper ways to fix this. Like paying farmers not to use water either temporarily or sort of in the long-term way. But you keep seeing policy and you know, other thinkers coming back to this idea because it seems a little simpler than that.
BRODIE: Right. So I would imagine there are also some environmental challenges in terms of building it, probably other legal like jurisdictional, like where, where would you actually build the pipeline? Like what are the other challenges that folks have said like, yes, this is in theory a great idea, but in practice, maybe not.
HAGER: Yeah, it would be difficult to engineer but not impossible. You know, the West is crisscrossed by all kinds of canals, and infrastructure to move water. We would not have Phoenix today without the Central Arizona Project covering 330 odd miles of desert, bringing water from far away to the Valley. Same thing goes for Denver and Los Angeles and Albuquerque and Salt Lake City.
But this one would be so big that it would be very difficult to pull off because anyone in the way might throw up some opposition, they might put up some red tape and say we actually don't want this giant new project running through our county or through my private land. And one expert I talked to said, look, we have all of these other smaller pipelines because they were feasible and the ones that are left are not feasible. There's a reason we haven't built this big cross country one.
BRODIE: OK. So if not a pipeline, then are there any other ways to feasibly get water from places that have too much of it to places that don't have enough of it?
HAGER: The big problem on the Colorado River is we have too much demand and not enough supply. We are able to technological help solve that equation, but we will not do it with a cross country pipeline. From what I can tell so far, a lot of that money is going into facilities to recycle water that we already have. you know, water that comes from showers and kitchen sinks and toilet flushes. We have the technology to purify it so it is drinkable again. We are more likely to see that happen soon than we are to see a big cross country pipeline.
BRODIE: I mean, it, it just, it's one of those things where when you think about it, it makes sense why this is such a challenge. But you see those images of Florida and North Carolina and then you see images, you know, like the cracked earth because it's so dry here in the West. And you think to yourself, man, there's got to be a way to make this happen. But as you're saying, there really isn't at least not one that makes financial sense and, and even in some cases makes like practical sense.
HAGER: Yes, all, all of the experts I talked to said something to that effect. I did talk to one who said we shouldn't completely write it off. He is a retired official with the Bureau of Reclamation, the Federal agency that manages Western water, and believe it or not in 2012, that federal agency actually looked at bringing an idea like this to reality.
They looked at the most reasonable solutions from finding water kind of near Colorado and piping it across a few 100 miles. They even looked at taking bags of melted icebergs and shipping them from Antarctica to the port of Los Angeles. And they kind of found that they were all not ready for prime time. But this official that I talked to said, look, we have a monumental challenge in front of us and it took herculean efforts to wrangle this river and make it useful for the West in the first place. We built the Hoover Dam and I was saying it'll take that scale of thinking to get out of today's problems, but I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon.
