You read it here first: Project Aquarius.

First, the underlying conditions and needs:

• Many countries, particularly the United States, span several or many climatic zones.
• Some areas have population concentrations which exceed the local resources' capacity, particularly that of water.
• Other areas have sparser populations and have a relative abundance of water.
• Weather cycles change areas from "wet" to "dry" over a period of years.
• These shifts occur over a period of about four to seven years.
  Note: I found a nice animated view of this "cycle" and have lost the url. If you find it, email it to me and I'll link it here. Thank you!
• Severe weather can parch or flood large areas over a short term or longer.
• Many population centers are located far from dependable, sustainable supplies of water.

We need to begin to think of a similarly-large investment for our nation's future success and economic health.

That is what the Project Aquarius goals are:

• Reduce the impact and damage of floods.
• Move water from flood- and erosion-prone areas to water-poor areas which could be fertile and productive if water were available.
• Move water from sparsely-populated areas to densely-populated areas efficiently and effectively.
• Mitigate the effects of long-term drought by reversing the mind-set of "limited and finite resource" associated with "lack of fresh water."

• A nationwide network of water pipelines.
• Capacity to move very large volumes of water between regions during flood emergencies.
• Capacity to migrate water from areas which are water-rich to areas which are water-poor, or back again, as weather long-term weather patterns change over periods of years.
• A system of holding reservoirs throughout the country, working in concert with the pipeline system, to act as intermediate storage facilities to absorb water transport during crises.
• Construction of ocean-based or ocean-side nuclear power/desalination plants.

As weather patterns change, some areas become wetter or drier through the years. The average rainfall or water supply can vary from "plentiful" to "drought emergency" over the span of just a few years.

While the idea of a nationwide system may appear daunting at first, there are areas of the country where this is done on a fairly large scale today. For example, the city of San Francisco, CA, gets a large amount of its water supply from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The water is piped well over a hundred miles from the mountains to a reservoir south of San Francisco, from which it is drawn to supply local needs. Similarly, Los Angeles derives much of its water from reservoirs and rivers which are far from the city itself. The mid-scale feasibility has been demonstrated for decades.

What is needed now is to have the vision to see that a nationwide system would have far-reaching benefits for the entire country, too.

Many challenges must be overcome, similar to those overcome during the planning and construction of the Interstate Highway System:

• Needs assessment and engineering.
• Design of the overall system.
• Phased implementation.
• Aquisition of land and/or access to the pipelines' right-of-way.
• Environmental impact considerations.
• Energy requirement forecasts for pumping water when gravity-feed is impossible or impractical.
• Creation and location for pumping and purification equipment.
• and so on...

The need for this kind of solution is nearly self-evident, but it will take a large mind-set shift for people to seriously consider the implementation of it. It will cost huge sums of money. The benefits of lessened flood damage to communities, cities and states and the lowering of fiscal and personal impact on them is just the start. A heavy rainstorm in one region of the US could mean additional water supply for cities and farms far away. The lower cost of this water, which normally would run to the sea taking homes and lives with it, would be a benefit to everyone in the country forever after. Please give it some consideration.

Other Considerations and Ideas...

• All reservoirs and dams with metered outflow or overflow controls must be equipped with appropriately-sized power generation units and linked into the nationwide power grid.
• All reservoirs lose capacity over time due to "silting up," or the filling of the reservoirs by dirt carried into them by the streams that feed them. All reservoirs should be dredged or dug out during wet or dry times to maintain their carrying capacity.
• Nuclear power plants can use deep, cold ocean-bottom water for cooling. Their evaporation-type cooling towers could be tapped to collect the steam-cloud which emanates from them to condense out the water, as well as to use some of the plants' output to run evaporative or possibly reverse-osmosis types of desalination equipment. The resulting supply of "fresh water" could be put into municipal water supplies or added to the Aquarius Project's pipelines to refill depleted reservoirs for cities and to water crops damaged by drought.

10.01.2007: A funny thing happened to me today: an appliance salesman commented that he "couldn't understand why nobody was dredging any of the lakes or reservoirs, now that the drought is here, big-time, and the water levels are so low. It would make so much sense to increase the capacities of the lakes and reservoirs so they'd have more capacity to supply water to the cities in the future!"

Here's the funny part: I replied, "Yeah, that was the exact subject of the first letter to the editor that I ever wrote to the Raleigh, NC, News & Observer, almost exactly two years ago, right after we moved here. They ignored it then, too."