What happens when a reservoir goes dry
practical.engineering
practical.engineering
Once you get past Yosemite, pretty much all of the reservoirs are empty to less than half full. Majority of the streams are gone.
It gets worse the further you head south. Kings and Sequoia are pretty much decimated forests from the fires and beetles. Dead trees for as far as you can see. Given the lack of water, I expect them to be desert in just a few more years.
There are quite a few hydro power generation stations deep in the mountains that I had no idea existed. I suspect they will close down as well. I wonder what effect that will have on California power supply over the coming years. That said, it was pretty clear that PG&E is working on updating the infrastructure as they are all over the place working on things.
If I hadn't seen it for myself, I wouldn't believe it. The extent of damage is pretty massive and it would take quite a lot of rain to 'fix' things. So much so that it would probably end up just flooding everything, creating just as much of a mess.
We have historic evidence that droughts have destroyed civilizations in that part of the country before. It is happening again.
The west is dominated by the [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermontane_Plateaus] , much of it losing water since the pluvial lakes like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bonneville] reached its greatest height 18000 years ago. "The abandoned shore lines have yielded evidence of past climatic changes second in importance only to those of the Pleistocene glaciated areas."[0]
A lot of snow falls in the winter, but for a century the meltwater has had plenty of mouths to feed. A lot of the distribution plans have been based on only a couple centuries of experience.
Mark Reisner originally wrote the book in the early 1990s, and his predictions have turned out to be quite accurate over the last three decades.
If you want to make informed decisions, as a voter and a resident, this is probably the single most important thing you need to get educated about.
It has absolutely no implications for the survivability of large scale civilizations in the area because the vast majority of the water goes to farming. Residential and office usage is willing to pay far more than farmers and uses significantly less.
The flow rate of the Colorado river could drop by another 70% and still support everyone living here (socal, az, nv). The instance things get a little dire, farmer rights will be stripped away by the voters, they’ll pay market rate like everyone else, and the problem will be solved overnight.
This is rude, and unnecessary. If your own counter-argument is actually sound, why are you bothering to label Reisner's as trash? It doesn't make you more believable--it mostly just undermines your credibility, because you apparently don't trust the soundness of your arguments to stand on their own.
Have you read the HN comment guidelines? I'll quote something that you might want to consider:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Right now, I have zero interest in engaging with you, because of the unpleasantly combatitive way you've chosen to approach the topic. What would even be the point of trying to have a discussion with someone who believes it's OK to speak to strangers like this?
Consider rewriting your comment, and maybe we can talk about the actual merits of Reisner... As it is now, good luck, and I hope you learn a better way to interact with the world.
Even if you can redo water rights (which won't happen), what happens when farmers lose their water? People aren't going to be stoked about not having easy access to beef, almonds, etc. And the farm subsidies would have to massively go up even more, which Republicans will fight tooth and nail for while pretending to defend the small farmer.
What isn't hyperbole is that cyclical mega droughts is part of our new norm and this is going to become an issue every year, alongside wildfires. None of it will be solved overnight, and it will probably get much much worse in our lifetimes. Welcome to the future lol.
The state's legislative apparatus will always do (and ONLY do) that which is achieved by the outcome of all the competing interests and their efforts at lobbying, contributing, marketing, persuading, bribing, intimidating, etc, etc. Occasionally there may be room for the individual conscience of a principled actor. But most often the ethics of individuals don't mean anything in the face of the economic, political, and cultural forces that shape state policy.
Even with direct ballot intiatives, we've just shifted the target of all those lobbying efforts from the statehouse to your house. The mass of voters might be less immediately corrupt and power-hungry than professional politicians in the legislature, but we're also more ignorant, stupid, distracted, and impatient than the pros.. And since ballot initiatives because a thing, we've managed to create about as many serious problems as we've been able to solve.
There is no such thing as "easily" when it comes to making laws--unless you're a dictator with a firm grip on power.
The speed of the response to Covid (initially...) was a good demonstration of how fast society can react when threatened with imminent danger. We went from "liberal democracies will never limit freedom of movement" to a broadly consensual "nobody can leave their house" in 2 weeks. How fast do you think the citizens of LA will change their mind about almond farming when their taps dry up?
Ultimately the citizens of LA don't have any meaningful political power outside of Sacramento. Water is a multi state thing and the urban dwellers have loud voices but no meaningful representation. They can yell all they want, but most of the country by area doesn't care about them. By population they should win every issue, but they haven't for decades because we don't actually have a democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife
;-)
You have just showed up with your own hyperbole, and nothing to back it up.
In Australia that's typical for many reasons. Are you sure they're not just seasonal flows?
Shit the utilities have never even had to bother considering failing is approaching drop dead lines.
Depending on rain August could be fun.
I’m not saying everything is fine with the environment. Just, this is to be expected with a large number of streams in the world. Maybe it’s not alarming in each case.
https://nation.time.com/2012/08/23/the-big-dry-up-where-the-... and https://stateclimatologist.web.illinois.edu/2012/11/27/why-t...
Thou we have a ton of snowpack this year on the coast still
A decent example would be the French creek watershed by Nanaimo. I think it’s estimated that only 15% of the flow is from snow, with most of that portion flowing during spring. The rest is rain, mostly from higher up in the watershed.
This watershed doesn’t dry up entirely, but it naturally reduces dramatically by July with many of its tributaries vanishing completely. There are many like it without that 15% melt water, some of which mostly vanish under the bed rock and gravel depositions along the creek beds.
Unfortunately that’s also increasingly true, and it’s causing all kinds of species to die in watersheds that previously even supported multiple seasons of salmon runs. The last paper I read on French Creek suggested even swamps in the watershed were drying too much, killing insects and amphibians. Many streams have lost entire salmon runs due to drying too much, too often. It’s a fragile system. It seems like deforestation plays a major role in these watersheds drying out.
Did you do any hikes that went up to higher elevations? Have you been through this area before to know what it typically looks like?
I agree its a bad year but this is not becoming a desert anytime soon
Here in the pnw I’m still waiting for the snowpack to melt in the alpine, 1m+ In places At around 1250m.
In the late 80s and early 90s I hiked that area every summer. I don't recall the tundra grass ever brown in July.
I almost couldn't recognize it. It's been bad since. During the pandemic was when we had those reddish end-of-days skies because of all the wildfires. I'm scared to go back and see what there is now.
For example, dams are only part of the water storage picture, there's also groundwater, and the water projects often had the goal of protecting groundwater (keeping the water table closer to the surface), but then once they'd provided water via a dam or aquaduct, the farmers would just expand the areas they were farming and groundwater extraction would often increase as a side effect.
Humans really aren't that good at long-term planning, is one conclusion.
Just as an aside.
New Orleans and basically all of Florida have tons of water. They are great examples of terrible places to build and we’re constantly subsidizing them to rebuild every year a hurricane rolls through.
This is so boneheaded I don't know where to begin. It is ok to put houses in places without water. It isn't okay to have too many houses in the desert. Entire towns and cities will be abandoned as this drought continues. Aqueducts won't solve that, nor will exporting unsustainable agriculture to other places where they will also run out of arable land/fertile topsoil given time with the exact same agricultural practices.
> New Orleans and basically all of Florida have tons of water. They are great examples of terrible places to build and we’re constantly subsidizing them to rebuild every year a hurricane rolls through.
This is sadly true. New Orleans has never recovered its population from before Katrina. Florida real estate is perpetually a deck of cards.
We have more than enough land in hospitable places with abundant water, and no consistent flooding or other major disasters.
Our shortsightedness alone probably leads to more than enough waste to house and feed the entirety of the planet.
Moving huge amounts of people is of course a logistical nightmare, but it would have been much easier a few hundred years ago.
Anyway, none of this is realistic because we're humans. Our foolishness is an inherent trait. If we can survive ourselves, it'll be out of pure luck.
Especially not within a system that gives you cool prizes if you don't.
I think the problem is long-term co-operation rather than planning. The temptation of short-term gain is always too great for someone.
It turns out to be very complex, and intertwined with other states etc.
Some marginal changes were made, and then the next winter was very wet.
1. Agri-food systems' pervasive externalities imply a divergence between the market price of foods and their social cost.
2. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that healthfulness, equity, resilience, and sustainability are interlinked, pre-competitive issues.
3. When faced with massive, systemic, even existential challenges, our ancestors envisioned and achieved remarkable innovations that ultimately begat the agri-food systems we have today, for good or for ill. It is time to do so again.
As we address these problems, we should really keep in mind the interconnectedness of water, food, health, environment, and society.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-88802-2_...
We produce more food on less land than ever. Nutrient dense food is available year round at an affordable cost to almost everyone for the first time in history. Increasingly big ag is switching to drip irrigation and no till where that is appropriate. There's are also a growing body of research into how to manage large farms with lower fertilizer inputs. Things are changing and improving, just unevenly and incrementally.
The ability for the world to produce a huge surplus of calories and to trade them as commodities across borders IS resilience.
HN bot remind me in one year.
One hidden issue that we will face is the rise of income in low-middle income countries. As their purchasing power increases, they will likely demand more meat and other, more expensive, food options. As we decrease our productivity for the sake of environmental impact, the invisible hand will force the price of food higher. I'm not saying we shouldn't promote regenerative ag, just that this will pose a major problem that we shouldn't ignore.
Cell-based meat currently only solves the ethical dilemma of meat. It's economies of scale are not strong. You need a lot of energy (GHG heavy), refined inputs, and no one talks about the ironic use of FBS.
As a matter of fact, since you bring up long term, cell based falls short of regenerative animal ag in terms of cost of and GHG mitigation over 100 year span.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milagro_Beanfield_War_(n...
The district system is a pain at first. It's different than every other city builder and tycoon system out there. But you do get used to it. It does make you think about how goods are distributed across the wide map and plan accordingly.
I never really noticed too much of a problem with the AI. The game seems a bit rigid in how tasks are queued. An emergency with immediate required tasks will require you to pause or cancel other tasks since the AI won't recognize that it's an emergency. But I never really had any problems with beavers not doing what they were supposed to do.
Overall, it's a great game. Structuring the water systems is deeply satisfying. There's no better feeling than when you build a large reservoir. And no better feeling of relief when the dry season ends and the rivers start flowing again.
And the water system makes for a good puzzle engine. I don't think there's any mods yet, but there are several custom maps from the community which create some lovely puzzles.
There's a custom map with water sources surrounding the map. Which creates a problem of too much water instead of too little. Thus requiring you to find ways quickly to manage the flow, and do much of your building in the dry season when you finally get a little relief. That puzzle essentially reverses the normal gameplay loop. The game is remarkably flexible in the number of different possibilities it offers.
The building system is also great. It's modular. You can save space in the narrow canyons by putting a bakery on the ground level, stack a couple of houses on top of it, and then put a roof garden on top. And then a network of stairs and walkways to connect everything. It's much more flexible than the usual city builders and there's some fairly creative ways of building a vertical beaver city that can fit into a narrow box canyon.
Cities Skylines also has water simulation (topo, dams, flow rates, pollution dispersion, floods, etc.) but it's not a huge part of the game. Water is integral to the beaver game and it's just a really fun way to think about how it affects civilizations.
"We don’t so much run out as we just use more expensive ways to get it. "
There's never going to be a moment when we squeeze the last drop of oil out of the Earth's crust. It's just going to keep getting more expensive as we drain the easier sources and have to look harder and drill deeper in more and more remote areas.
Let's say that you have an oil field that contains a quantity of oil that, when burned, would release X megajoules of energy.
The oil company consumes Y amount of energy extracting, refining, and transporting that oil.
At the moment, Y is less than X, but Y is getting larger relative to X. Once Y and X are sufficiently close, it's no longer energetically worthwhile to pull oil out of the ground.
In this scenario, oil power plants can't operate anymore anyway, so demand for oil probably gets relegated to stuff like classic cars.
Edit: why Germany is now so troubled about Russian gas? Not because they'll freeze, but because the choice is to either freeze or shut down most of the industry. Which you can't just spin up in a couple of weeks.
However, try to design an aircraft using natural gas, batteries, coal, hydrogen, etc and you run into huge issues.
As for water, there's plenty of it in the ocean. All you need is some cheap energy to desalinate it. Californians need not worry. One of the richest and high tech economies in the world sitting right next to the largest reservoir of water on the planet. They'll figure it out eventually.
I'm not saying it will be easy. But the combination of large scale investments in making renewable energy generation dirt cheap and increasingly more energy efficient ways to desalinate water inevitably means that people will have access to as much water that they need when this gets pushed far enough. Just a matter of time. Lots of places manage to get by with desalinated water already. Large parts of the middle east for example. It's just about making the process cheaper and more efficient.
Also this seems like it would be more of an issue in shallow waters than it would be in open ocean. A simple pipe to deeper waters probably goes a long way to fixing things. The Pacific is pretty deep near the Californian coast and has strong currents too. The volume of water moving through that is probably many orders of magnitude larger than any brine you can dump there. So, unless I'm very wrong about this, I'd expect things to dilute pretty quickly.
According to them, it's the fault of little fish we are trying to keep from going extinct by supplying it with precious freshwater. This is after far left environmentalists took over the Democrat party. Oh, and climate change is a hoax. This is just a normal drought.
I think it's actually a failure of political leadership. I'm not saying it's easy to get multiple states to respond to a crisis, but as long as it doesn't happen people continue to use water as they did before.
One example regarding the little fishes is the San Joaquin River, which was dammed in the 1940s for human use to the point that it ran dry before meeting the ocean. After 20 years of environmental lawsuit, it was determined in the 2000s that the river must be restored for salmon run that hasn't existed in 70 years.
Similarly, % of water from the Sacramento river delta exported have significantly decreased since the 90s over concern for the delta smelt.
As an aside, the delta smelt are basically extinct, so they aren't contributing much towards our current salmon consumption. Thats not to say they can't someday recover and lead to the type of consumer utility you are talking about.
Same thing works with climate change. "Oh no, scientists tricked us into not pouring massive quantities of pollution into the atmosphere, all for nothing!"
We can debate the exact impact of the impact of removing water from an area or pouring chemicals into the water and air and ground, but if we conservatively guess that doing these things is marginally bad, what's the penalty? Slightly slower economic growth?
My brain read the entire post in his voice, and I couldn't seem to turn it off. What's interesting is that I felt like I understood the post better, and I think it may be that I was reading it slower, as if he were speaking it. He has a really pleasant way of explaining things.
But it was more about the strategy and purpose of dams in general. That's ok, just not what I was expecting.
On a different note, I puzzle over in my mind how city planners deal with the fact that they have to supply water to a city no matter what the use of it is, and cannot (?) price the water differently based on the usage.
For example, what "right" or pricing should a casino in Las Vegas be allowed to have on water, compared to a residential house with a family in it? Is it reasonable in a desert city to have to pay and support water being produced at great cost, only to be used for entertainment and leisure? How about agriculture?
And even then, when does it get too expensive to justify? Does a city have a right to exist in a place which is arid? And when does government declare (if it ever does) that it's simply too hard or expensive to support a city existing in a place that has a scarcity of water?
Also related, whenever I see water restrictions being asked of a city/state's population, I wonder, why can prices not serve to regulate people's consumption (beyond a certain minimum human right to have a certain amount of water available for subsistence) and we have to ask people to do a favor for the collective good instead of charge them for a commodity?
I think we are soon running into the situation where pricing water essentially at the cost of moving it around, rather than its scarcity and demand, may cause us trouble(s).
You said it yourself in the same sentence. It's a subsistence need, which makes the politics especially acute.
There are places with pay-per-use water metering, both in western and non-western countries, but I've not heard of any that have a basic allowance or dual-rate system such that a "normal" amount is cheap and higher amounts are more expensive. Nor have I seen this for electricity.
> How about agriculture?
California prioritizes agriculture over residents because agriculture has concentrated political power.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...
It's kind of ridiculous that we grow much of our food in CA and ship it all over the country.
As transportation costs are rather minuscule fraction of the cost of the food, it is much cheaper to buy food from afar, where it’s cheaper than local food.
I live in Slovakia, water scarcity was not even a hypothetical possibility for most people in the past.
And now we are dealing with floods and (more recently) draughts. Our soil can basically no longer hold water. Agricultural fields are so compacted, there are layers which are essentially waterproof. During the last decades, we built all kinds of drainage and flood management systems to send any water away as quickly as possibly.
And now we are starting to have super dry summers. It will be an interesting thing to watch, because there things are not going to be reversed quickly, if at all.
In regards to Lake Mead, perhaps others, the size and keeping it near full affords you time to find an alternative supply or some other solution that is undeterminable at concept/construction.
I don't see that changing anytime soon. We'll just look the other way while infrastructure crumbles around us, and then point fingers blaming each other for failing to notice.
Not necessarily on solutions... just, here's the cut of the top 8 issues. Work on these.
Or perhaps even ignore the suggested cut list of relevant topics? At their peril.
If anything, it'd make things worse.
Tax cuts? Passes with 98% approval
Spending money on anything? No.
Spending money would too.
Raising funds? Not so much.
But he could have done it in so many different ways. The way he's done it is a very clean and easy way to read. Even has some links embedded.
I can only imagine that eg Braille readers will have a far easier time with this than a YouTube video, even perhaps with subtitles provided.
WCPGW? I expected a little more on this. I know that in-ground pools "pop" when their load is removed, but thats a smaller scale effect. Removing the back pressure on a static dam wall cannot be without consequence. I'm expecting that the least outcome is an increase in cracking due to flex, but an opportunistic chance to both measure/assess and remediate issues "inside" the dam wall side.
It also gets massively thick as you get deeper. Far more than you would think by looking at the exposed part. Check out old construction photos.
If they knew the worst-case drought possible would last N days, they could design the reservoir to hold N+1 days worth of water. Alas, they don't know N.
Edit: Near end of day... Can you tell? Wrote draught instead of drought.
Just before your edit, I spent a while amused at the vision of some guy trying to chug the entire reservoir while being egged-on by inebriated friends.
That quote is saying that planners have no way of actually predicting how bad the worst possible drought will be for the area serviced by the reservoir over the lifetime of the reservoir, so they can't actually design the reservoir to handle the worst-case scenario.
It's just not generally done over long distances. Oil is pumped over long distances, but it's also much more valuable. For water, we rely more on cheaper ways of transporting it, and transporting it over shorter distances, using things like aqueducts and, yes, pipelines.
Here's an example of a big water pipeline project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cyprus_Water_Supply_P...
There are many issues with transporting large quantities of water vast distances. From legal (it is illegal to transport water from the Great Lakes to outside of their basin), to physics (water is expensive to pump up and over mountain ranges and building tunnels is incredibly expensive.
Basically, just like there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build dams or pumped hydro electricity storage, there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build pipelines.
I don’t think so. In reality, it is a major enegitical issue.
Desalination plants need a lot of energy. If tomorrow we lack of petrolum, how do you get water? Not with $
The issue is just getting seawater there, but that is a tractable problem.
Well, yeah, just like an empty battery isn't necessarily a bad thing; it means it has been used, which is probably better than having prevented it from being used, but ... still worrying, in the sense of having ran out of storage/capacity. Not very convinced of this point.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduc_de_l%27Avre
(Can’t find an English copy so you’ll have to machine translate)
I mean like 50% of a city's water supply scale, obviously centuries away.
Why is there irrigated farming in Arizona?? It's a desert!
Edit: grammar
I suppose this is assuming that there's not going to be water in the future, and that you just want to extract whatever use there is left from an area before giving it over to desertification.
If they did this, in a couple years they still wouldn't have water, and now they'd also wouldn't have land to pour the water onto, so they will end up in an ever worse state than now.
Although I thought they assigned too many water rights because they measured in a period of flooding. John Oliver is the first time I heard that they knew it was a lie at the time.
In that sense, they work just fine, we know and have a framework for determining who owns the water, and who gets nothing when there isn't enough.
The issue is when people want water and don't like the answer of buy someone's rights.
Historically, non replenishable Groundwater has been treated like oil or mineral deposits, if you own it, you can use it up.
Nor is there anything stopping people in border areas from taking all the water in another state's aquifer.
Interstate groundwater conflicts come up less frequently but there is a framework for deciding them. You may be interested in this recent Supreme Court ruling on exactly that subject.
https://globalwaterforum.org/2021/12/21/u-s-supreme-court-is...
It’s far more complex then you seem to think it is
But there's never enough. It's oversold. Much like an airplane gets oversold. Only in this case 16% more water was assigned an owner than exists in an average year.
> don't like the answer of buy someone's rights.
That's not always something you can do because water rights are a state matter. Some water rights transfer with the real estate it is attached to. Some are locked into a specific owner and are non-transferable. Even if they can be transferred, because too many water rights were assigned, if you move to them to a different location the river might run dry before it gets to you.
Water rights come with priority. When there aren't enough units, they describe who gets what is available and who goes without.
It's not oversold, some rights just have very low priority and value. It is like paying to be 100th on your airplane wait list.
I have never heard of a water right tied to a person, and not a location and source. They aren't transferable like that. You may be thinking of water contracts, which are different. Essentially a contractual agreement between a private party and a water supply organization like the California state water project
Like I said, there is a system to determine who gets priority and who goes without.
Arizona, Nevada, Utah and others split up the Colorado river between them. That split does not use a priority system. So the person in Arizona in a bad year with a high priority is still behind people in other states with a lower priority, as long as that state doesn't use more than their water. And water rights cannot transfer between states.
If one state uses more than their water, they can be sued for damages by the harmed state.
Im still not sure how this relates to your original claim that there are too many water rights, or what you mean by "too many". too many for what? too many for water to be left for the environment? too many to count on your fingers and toes?
What a libertarian and HN explanation. Quelle surprende.
Mesopotamia isn’t a desert either. It’s called the Fertile Crescent. It is surrounded by desert, but so is everywhere else if you travel far enough.
Great conditions for growing greens in the winter. Dry (lower insect and disease pressure), warm in the winter, lots of sun.
And, used to be plenty of water.
And by the time all of humanity is immediately threatened it's too late to save it.
Your wish has already been granted. Check out Salt Lake City in the next two years as well.
I'm almost positive we (humans) won't do anything until there is absolutely no other choice but to do something.
Basically, everything is an energy problem. If we have cheap, clean, energy, we can solve a lot of our problems.
For example, if we had nuclear powered desalination plants, we could have more than enough fresh water.
Sorry, friend, but I just wanted to fix that for you.
Yes, and in the vast majority of cases the easiest way to solve an energy problem is to use less energy rather than produce more. This applies to water (where it's much easier to use it where it naturally rains), transportation, heating/cooling, etc, etc.
I'd be for it, as long as they find a useful use for brine that doesn't involve dumping it back into the ocean.
We are still quite far from true existential threat if the worst case is some minor ecological damage.
And then produce prices rise until even the most absurd federal subsidies can't stop people from planting things other than corn, and then produce prices are super high and meat prices are super high because corn gets more expensive too, and then we have massive food price inflation.
It's basically just a market correction, but a big one while our entire food system is reconfigured and American diets adjust.
I feel like we can all adjust our diets to survive without alfalfa and almonds...
While ‘you’ may not be devoting time and money towards this problem, rest assured that ‘They’ are.
There is plenty of water. The methods of distributing it vary across the decades and centuries. But, it gets done. By people ‘we’ hire through ‘our’ taxes and water bills to do it.
At any given time, there are reservoirs being planned, water rights being negotiated, drills being sunk, pipelines being laid, etc. It gets done. It always gets done. If people wish to live in a desert, they’ll get water one way or the other. If it gets too expensive, they’ll move. No big deal.
As long as food production is taken care of where water is, getting people drinking water is pretty easy.
Also, the cost to transport gasoline is not $4.50 a gallon. The actual commodity is almost all of that. You can already find water in retail stores transported thousands of miles for $1 a gallon at retail.
[0]: https://www.wsd.gov.hk/en/core-businesses/water-resources/se...