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Comment by mcone | Hacker News Reader

There's no mention of deadpool in the article, but water managers are actively discussing it. Current estimates project that deadpool is ~10 years away for Lake Mead. If (when?) Lake Mead and Lake Powell hit deadpool, the Colorado River literally stops flowing past the dams. See https://sky-lights.org/2021/10/04/deadpool-at-hoover-dam/

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I liked this quote from the article you cited:

  Is there any way to keep the Lower Colorado River flowing? It may seem like
  an engineering oversight not to have a way for that 815 billion gallons of
  water trapped in deadpool to get past the dam. But as they say in the software
  business, that’s a “feature” and not a “bug”.

This then answered my question why they couldn't just let water run through the original bore tunnels (which were cemented in, instead of maintained).

Good article, thanks for the link.

The concrete plugging the tunnels can be removed, and has been before.

Here's a project in Oregon where the original diversion tunnel plug was removed, to allow drawing cold water from the bottom of the lake to feed the river:

https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2005/tr...

But water is still flowing into the lakes, so would it not eventually reach an equilibrium where water flows past the dam at the same rate it enters the lake?

The water level is going down, so the rate leaving is already higher than the rate coming in.

If I understand it correctly, had there been no dam, the river would already be dry.

Evaporation is a huge problem for these lakes. By some estimates, each lake loses 800,000 acre feet of water to evaporation annually.

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