Texas Wildfires, Louisiana Floods: A Proposal
I’ll throw this one out and let the commenters pick it apart.
Here’s what I notice, though – for a good bit of the year, we’ve dealt with too much water in Louisiana. High river levels in the Mississippi threatened levees from the Arkansas line to the mouth of the river and we’ve got some flooding from Tropical Storm Lee going on right now.
And yet next door in Texas they’re dealing with the worst drought in years. Well more than a billion dollars in damage has been done to crops in the Lone Star State, and now over 1,000 homes have been lost thanks to wildfires there. The state is bone-dry and it looks as though things could well get much worse. Texas Gov. Rick Perry pulled out of tomorrow night’s GOP debate – the one which served as the backdrop for all the sniping about President Obama’s address to Congress – because of the problems in his home state and the all-out effort to stop those wildfires, which have bedeviled Texans all year. Six of the 10 worst wildfires in Texas history have hit this year.
We’ve got too much water here and they don’t have enough there.
So why wouldn’t it be a decent idea to build a pipeline from, say, the Old River Control Structure west into Texas?
The Keystone XL pipeline carries with it an estimated $7 billion price tag, and that’s to run a pipe from Canada to Port Arthur. This would be 20 percent of that distance, though perhaps it might be necessary to run pipelines throughout West Texas if the goal is water distribution.
But a lot of that is details and logistics. It would seem that if Texas is going to have drought problems every other year, and Louisiana has one of the world’s largest rivers flowing through it, that Louisiana river water could be used to irrigate Texas crops or put out Texas fires. The money saved from drought or fire damage, if that damage is going to be in the billions (and one pipeline can’t save all of it – I get that), might make the pipeline pay for itself, one would imagine.
It’s just an idea. And I don’t propose any government spending on a water pipeline from Louisiana to Texas; if there’s no profit in it then we shouldn’t waste taxpayer dollars on it.
T. Boone Pickens already has the right of way for a pipeline he planned to bring water from up around the TX Panhandle to the DFW Metro Area for the local municipal water systems in the area.
Reverse the flow of the Red River through a series of locks and dams? It could certainly carry more than a pipeline.
how about using our excess Miss River water to flow into the Barataria Basin and rebuild our marsh/coast
Too much silt for a pipe.
EPA. Need I say more? 7 billion will not cover the fees for lawyers who will start suing over every square foot of land for pipelines, reservoirs and pumping stations. Legal actions over water rights and ecosystems will drain much from the economy so there will not be anything we can do until we limit the overreaching power of the EPA. Here is one small example: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2009/03/31/abc-judge-cuts-water-california-farmers-save-endangered-fish
I think this is a fantastic idea. In fact, I had been thinking about doing that before I read this.
Putting the water where it’s needed in a drought is a no brainer. Of course, nothing is free,
but in the long run would save crops and help in many other ways. Go for it.
Sounds like heaven to me!
The Corps of Engineers did a detailed study of this in the 1960s and found it would cause tremendous harm to Louisiana’s coast. If I’m not mistaken, the first coastal erosion research began in connection with that study.
Just get it to Toledo Bend…Texas will take it from there. In fact, they already do. So much water that the Sabine River Authority was recently blocked from selling more water to Texas because the reservoir is so low. Not all portions of the state are as fortunate as our waterlogged friends East of I-49.
http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/20110827/NEWS01/108270327/Sabine-board-OKs-contract-sell-Toledo-Bend-water-use-TexasBut why divert it from Old River. Don’t think Texas hasn’t already developed plans to divert water south from the Red to fill reservoirs all across northern and eastern Texas.