In his Wednesday letter, Dennis Devlin proposed to move water from the Columbia River to the Colorado River via a 350-mile pipeline. He points to the fact that China completed its 1,115-mile Grand Canal as an aqueduct project, so why can’t we?
But to do that now would cost more than $100 billion. And that is assuming you could even get through today’s environmental impact assessments and modern regulations, which would further burden costs.
How about copying the Saudis by building a desalinization plant with a 1-mile inlet pipe to provide all of California’s coastal areas and low-lying desert agricultural farms with an inexhaustible supply of water. That would leave the lower-Colorado River water for Nevada and Arizona.
