Engineering360: "Water management during floods and droughts"

I was unaware of the work being done in India. It sounds like they are ahead of the USA regarding water allocations. My parents and a couple generations before them were all Californians, so I am aware of the crazy laws regarding water rights out there. The first one gets it, subsurface water goes to whoever pumps it, and those whose rights predate the state are safe.

Early in the 1900's the city of Los Angeles sent their people to the fertile Owens Valley and bought up the water rights of the early settlers there. They then dammed the Owens River and shipped ALL its water in new aqueducts to the city. There was a multi-year war with many killed, multiple times when the aqueduct was bombed, and the use of troops to finally settle things. Today, the Owens Valley is a desert.

Prior to the dams that made Lake Mead, the Colorado river flowed freely to the Gulf of California in Mexico, with steamboats carrying people and produce along its lower sections. Now it is a nearly dry ditch with occasional water only after a rare rain, despite treaties between the USA and Mexico. Water for Los Angeles comes from the Owens and Colorado rivers and rivers in Northern California over 500 miles away, pumped up by 1900 feet to cross over the Tehachapi mountains (14 pumps at 80,000 HP each). There it crosses multiple major active earthquake fault lines, with corresponding risks.

The ultimate answer to our water needs--extreme changes in our historical approaches; with possible major disruptions. Our planet's carrying capacity has been exceeded. Large numbers of people will claim that we can engineer or innovate ways around this, but we will always be faced with the harms from unexpected consequences.

--JMM