Lake Mead has a 50/50 chance of drying up by 2021. So what?
Have you any friggin’ idea of how many people and economic interests are dependent on Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the United States?
It is located on the Colorado River, a half hour from Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s the water impounded by the Hoover Dam. The water in Lake Mead is released via aqueducts to communities in southern California, Nevada and Arizona. The water for cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas comes from Lake Mead. It’s also the supply of water for irrigation. Which means food, some of which sits on your table and mine.
The news (below) on the risk for Lake Mead follows a string of pressing water shortages in other parts of the USA, too.
The plans for diverting water from Canada to the U.S. have been on the drawing boards for decades. “NAWAPA” is a word we should all be familiar with.
NAWAPA is “The North American Water and Power Alliance-NAWAPA- “the most comprehensive of a series of plans developed during the 1950s and 1960s to capture and redistribute fresh water in Alaska and Canada. NAWAPA would deliver large quantities of water to water-poor areas of Canada, the lower forty-eight states of the United States of America, and Mexico. In the mid-1960s, this giant engineering project in water management was seen by leading figures in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere as the next great undertaking to which the United States should commit itself as a nation, comparable in scope and benefits to the NASA space program and the rapid and widespread development of nuclear power. …”
More info at http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=879 also http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=883
Canadians are pretty well versed on the need to keep water out of the hands of those who want to sell it, thanks to Maud Barlow and the Council of Canadians, the Polaris Institute and others. Which makes it difficult to accomplish NAWAPA. The urgency mounts. Lake Mead dries up? They only see one remedy. It lies to the North.
People who have worked in water circles and understand the situation in the U.S. are very concerned that the Troop Exchange Agreement will make it very difficult to continue to protect our water supply.
The only way to fight the Agreement is to let people know about it.
THE STUDY ON LAKE MEAD (From website “Grist”)
“There’s a 50-50 chance that the Arizona- and Nevada-bordering, human-made Lake Mead could become Dry Ditch Mead by 2021, according to a study to be published in the journal Water Resources Research. Oh, and that’s a conservative estimate, say the study authors, as is this one: By 2017, there’s an equally good chance that water levels in the reservoir could drop so low that the Hoover Dam would be incapable of producing hydroelectric power. Study coauthor Tim Barnett says he was “stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us.” The study recommends that officials implement conservation and mitigation policies and technologies.”