Why can’t the US build infrastructure that automatically siphons water from flood zones to the west during flood seasons?
In: 4
Because you are talking about a massive undertaking of manpower, money and resources to harvest water from a different state every year.
You’re basically talking about re-routing at least one different river every year.
Cost.
The sheer size of that project would be insane. And you would be pumping water up a lot of hills.
If cost was no issue.
The size of the pipes and number of pipes required to transport that ammount of water is impractical. Then the energy required to pump that water up the water though the hills and across that distance would take the output of mutiple nuclear reactors alone.
– The west is really, *really* far away from where the flooding would be happening, the piping alone would be enormously expensive
– The west is also *uphill* from where the flooding would be happening, and siphoning doesn’t work uphill, the outlet has to be lower than the inlet
– There’s not a continuous string of federal land between the flood areas and the zone that the piping could even be placed on. It would require an enormous exercise of eminent domain that would keep the project constantly bogged down in court battles
You’d ruin the ecosystems in the flood zone areas and I think you’re vastly underestimating how much infrastructure would be needed to collect/transport/disperse that much water
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