Originally published at: Lake Mead is dangerously close to becoming a "dead pool" | Boing Boing
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But what is a “dead pool”?
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A sports pool for dying.
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That’s very concerning…
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But actually: What is a “Dead Pool”
I meant to say: I never heard the term when I worked at Bureau of Reclamation. Maybe it’s a branding thing with Disney?
I may still have some software running at Hoover, pretty sure I still have some running in the sensor network downstream. Kind of weird to think about.
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Hats off to the would be assassin who was able to drive two cars at once in SF.
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“Nothing to see here! And while we’re talking, why not buy a brand-new McMansion on a fully landscaped lot in the middle of the desert?”
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A Dead Pool is a first cousin to a Dust Bowl. Both are related to the Fucked Duck family. Never go to one of their reunions if you can avoid it.
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When I took the Hoover Dam tour ~15 years ago, the bus driver would not shut up about how all us tourists should move to Vegas and buy a house in one of the gated communities there – he was pretty obviously being paid to shill this to his captive audience. When he took a break, I loudly asked “Where I live, we have so little crime that we don’t have gated communities, and that’s in a suburb of DC. How much crime do you have that you have to lock yourselves inside fences and gates to feel safe?”
He was quiet for a while after that, never answered the question, and seemed sullen about it. I can’t imagine the desiccation and draining of Lake Mead has improved things any, though I can’t get figures from the last couple of years yet. Yet another reason not to move into an arid, desert region whose water is all claimed and fought over already.
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I understand it means there isn’t enough water to flow out of the basin, leaving it all to evaporate in place. That tends to make the remaining water saline and gross and toxic to everything in it – the Salton Sea is a famous example – and in this case would mean the end of all the hydroelectricity we use it for.
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That’s… terrifying, honestly. Climate refugees will start coming from everywhere, USA not immune at all.
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What about a brand new Mickey-Mansion out in Rancho Mirage? Complete with a lagoon!
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The caffeine does me less and less good each day… I misremembered it being the sequel to Harper
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While a permanent dead pool could result in that, please remember that Lake Powell, which feeds Lake Mead, as well as other reservoirs upstream, do still have a bit of water left, and there will be water incoming from snowmelt, precipitation, and ground seeps, even annual floods. This isn’t the Salton Sea, and so long as there is water incoming, the watershed authorities will cycle water through the lowest available penstocks to keep salinity in the reservoirs and the Colorado River at low levels and water flowing to meet the treaty and other legally required water flows.
That said, since the region is, according to climatologists, returning to its historically arid conditions, there is a definite need for the historical users of Colorado River water to stop sucking so hard on a straw that has already emptied the milkshake down to the last bits congealing on the sides. New penstocks, perhaps designed to allow the resevoir’s “dead pools” to simply drain completely rather than stagnate, can be built, dams can be bypassed and, if determined to simply not be needed or wanted anymore, removed.
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But that assumes those steps will be taken. People in power will have to actually make tough decisions (which will be challenged in court by those who are affected by them) to favor the future over the status quo.
It’s not impossible, but it will be difficult and the folks who are in place to make those kinds of decisions…don’t. They have a history of kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with.
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So is there any plan at all for providing drinking (and bathing, and cooking, and etc) water to the millions of people that will soon no longer have it? Or is it just “hope we get more rain and buy bottled water if not?”
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