Has anyone ever given any thought to trying to capture all the floodwaters that seem to be increasing lately, and moving them to the more drought affected areas?
On top of the logistics of moving massive amounts of water around, flood water is typically highly contaminated - by their nature, floods sweep up everything in their path, which typically will include things like:
- Soil and sand (a massive pain to filter out)
- Agricultural run off (manure, pesticides, fertilizer, …)
- Raw sewage (from treatment plants that tend to be near waterways, or just from damaged infrastructure)
- Industrial wastes (from existing plants, or old contaminated sites)
Infectious disease is a major problem after a flood, partly because of infrastructure damage but also just because so many people will have come in contact with contaminated water - you don’t want to irrigate your crops with flood water, much less drink it
Flood water is a terrible material.
It is full of sand, dirt, plants, animals (dead and alive), chemicals, germs of all kinds, body parts, dangerous pieces of junk…
Definitely not worth the effort. You want nothing else but to get away from it.
Moving? No. But apparently an early benefit of dams was to provide water throughout the year. Might see more of that.
Moving water is tricky. If you’re lucky you can move it downhill, but I expect the situations where you can do that from flood to drought is not common. Moving uphill is pretty much out because it’ll take too much energy.
How would you move all that water? A fleet of water trucks carrying thousands of gallons (barely a dent)? A series of pipes across hundreds/thousands of miles? Who’s going to pay for it? And then you get into the problem of not actually knowing when/where a flood is going to hit. Yes, there’s flood zones, but a pipe route is going to be very specific, I doubt you could just pick it up and move it wherever. Maybe something would be done for a long-term problem to alleviate an already permanently flooded area, but it seems like such a massively expensive undertaking, I’m not sure anyone would be willing to do it.
Yeah logistics would be a tall hill to climb, but onsite storage could maybe simplify it a bit. Like an under ground tank fed by things like storm drains?
Please send your empty bottles to flooded areas.
Thank you for your contribution.
I would but i reuse all mine
Some cities catch flood water, hold it, and release it to reservoirs, rivers, etc. later. Chicago’s is interesting and Dallas has a GIANT water vault under Central Expressway. I think most of our water comes from dead (animal) soup.
Glad to hear its not entirely wasted
You need to chat with Adrian Wapcaplett, he’s a partner at a marketing firm that can sell just about anything.
Build an aqueduct!
A thousand mile acqueduct would be less feasable than a giant underground storage tank
a giant underground storage tank
That’s basically what groundwater is already.
The trick isn’t storing it. The earth does that naturally. The trick is moving it where there isn’t enough.
