You read it here first.. unless you're one of two or three people I've emailed this idea to prior to the "first revision date," below.

What the United States (and many other countries in the world) need to embark on right now is another project like the Apollo Project to put a man on the Moon, except bigger, more expensive, and more valuable on a day-to-day basis than anything since maybe the Roman Aqueducts.

Problem description:

• Many areas of the United States [which will be used as an example here from now on...] suffer from extreme water shortages and/or abundance.
• Hurricanes and tropical storms drop untold volumes of water on areas unable to store or absorb the rainfall, causing floods and huge property damage.
• Droughts periodically hit large regions, jeopardizing water supplies for agriculture and manufacturing as well as potable water supplies for the local population.
• There is no system available or being planned or constructed which could balance these situations of shortage and surplus, to the detriment of virtually everyone in the United States.
• This situation will assuredly become worse in the future as the population expands and migrates, and also if global temperature swings which are forecast come to be.

This is my personal manifesto to everyone in the USA and other countries of the world:

• There is a conceptual solution which can be implemented.
• The solution, or something very much like it, should and must be implemented.
• The time span for design, engineering and implementation must be on the order of several decades. It's very unlikely that it could be done more quickly, in my estimation, and I would caution that to wait more than a few years to begin work on this may not be "too late," but will certainly increase the overall cost dramatically and be detrimental to even more people in the USA and the world.

What Needs To Be Done:

• Design and build a national pipeline network to transport both potable and non-potable [i.e., flood] waters from region to region.
• Virtually all states must be interconnected, much as gasoline, natural gas and fuel oil are pumped through pipelines across the country today.
• Flood waters must be pumped to drought-stricken areas to be purified, inserted into city water systems, fed into reservoirs and streams to maintain their flows.
• No dam or other water catchment system should be allowed to overflow under normal or even heavy-rain conditions. The water should be moved into the national network to where it is needed most.
• All states should participate, at their will. While droughts and excessive rain can occur virtually any time and anywhere, cyclical patterns have shown that excess or scarcity of water can occur anywhere in the country.
• While some areas may rarely be in drought and others rarely in surplus, this system would move water to where it's needed and wanted, within the limits of the system and its design and any organizations which operate it.
• In addition, virtually every catchment or dam should and must have provision for times when water release is appropriate, that the water's energy not be lost, but be run through turbines and electrical generators to feed the national electrical grid.

That's what I believe we need; that's what I believe should be considered for immediate development and implementation. Please contact your elected leaders on local, state and national levels to consider this suggestion. We will all benefit from it at some time or another, if it is in place. Consider the alternatives.... floods, droughts, property damage...