Every year, it seems, the upper Mississippi river floods. Towns, large and small, in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, are inundated and angry. Meanwhile, at the western edge of the Mississippi watershed, that is, Colorado's eastern slope, we're in the midst of a 10-year drought that has farmers desperate and the rest of us concerned, too. My own propery, in fact, includes what is euphemistically labeled on topo' maps as the headwaters of Horse Creek. Horse Creek, you see, is dry. On the map, it winds through south-eastern Colorado to join the Arkansas River (not dry) in La Junta. In reality, it's just sand. There are a lot of supposed creeks like that, all supposedly feeding the Arkansas but, in fact, dry.
Now, we seem (by we I mean people) to have no problem stringing pipelines all over creation to carry oil and natural gas. Those pipelines have serious problems: a leak can mean serious environmental catastrophe. On the other hand, we (again, people) have solved all the major engineering problems involved in laying the pipe in the first place, insuring continuous flow, regulating output, that sort of thing.
What if, instead of oil, we piped water from the upper Mississippi to the barren plains of the western basin? Two problems solved: flooding controlled, and drought mitigated. Moreover, water isn't biodegradable, compressible, or any other-ble that makes oil pipelines dangerous, or expensive to maintain, or detrimental to the environment. The pipe springs a leak in Nebraska? Who cares? It's just water! The cost of installation would probably be recouped in 2 or 3 years of disaster recovery savings. Plus, I might just get a lake out of it. Furthermore, the water will eventually get to the same place, joining the Mississippi in Arkansas after it's quieted down some.
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