A plan, in theory

Where there’s a will . . .

We called it! For years, we’ve wondered — sometimes aloud — why Americans don’t take excess water in the muggy East and transport it, via pipeline, to the dry West. After all, the core Alaska pipeline is about as long as the distance between Monroe, La., and Santa Rosa, N.M.

Water goes through a pipeline just as easily as oil. When the Mississippi is cresting at flood level, why not divert a bunch of that to the American dust bowl around the Four Corners?

It would take a lot of work. But that’s why God made infrastructure engineers. And we keep seeing all the articles about the low lake and river levels in the West, and how folks there are worried about how they’ll water their lawns next year. And over this way, sometimes we have H2O in abundance.

Now, finally, somebody has been listening. There’s a plan in the planning stages that’s being planned. So we’re told by planners.

Large-scale water diversion may sound difficult and expensive (weren’t the interstates?), but that option appears to be on the table as many Western lawmakers watch as the Colorado River basin dries up. And not only the Colorado River basin. The idea is to pump floodwater from the Mississippi River to bolster the lakes, rivers and streams west of Texas.

Arkansas exports rice, cotton, steel, boats . . . why not water?

The naysayers were heard from. The engineering is possible, they say. But the logistics are difficult at best. There’s the politics involved in multistate pipelines, costs are expected to hit the billions, and decades of construction would be required. Our answer to that: Americans do this kind of expensive, long-term, helpful thing.

The Arizona legislature passed a measure in 2021 urging Congress to investigate the feasibility of a pipeline diverting water from the Big Muddy to what’s becoming the Big Dust Bowl. And last summer, the state passed a law investing $1.2 million for funding water conservation projects and others that could bring water into the state, including the feasibility of importing water from other states.

Where there’s a will, there’s usually a way.

A recent analysis from a scientist at Western Illinois University determined that water could be moved from the Mississippi through a pipeline 88 feet in diameter or a canal 100 feet wide and 61 feet deep. Again, physically possible but costly, to say the least.

Filling the Colorado River’s Lake Powell and Lake Mead would cost more than $134 billion under the WIU proposal, which didn’t account for construction costs or costs related to environmental concerns.

The naysayers naysay: What about when the Mississippi is low? Huh? Huh?

Then no water would be pumped. And the Western states would be no worse than they are now, water-wise.

But when water is plentiful, why let it wash out to sea when it could be better used? The Gulf of Mexico has plenty of its own water.

There are other, major considerations: Endangered species and wetlands protections. Rights of way for such a pipeline. Pumps to get the water uphill. These aren’t problems to be sneezed at.

But they could be overcome. Maybe not at the expense currently estimated.

But something tells us that if the water problem out West gets worse, the money will be found.

So will the will.