Return of the dust bowl

Lake Mead water levels drop closer to dead pool status

Water levels at Lake Mead dropped to historic lows this week with persistent drought exacerbated by climate change and increased water demands driving the reservoir closer to becoming a “dead pool.”

The nation’s largest reservoir on Thursday measured at 1,043.8 feet, its lowest level since the lake was filled in the 1930s.

The minimum elevation to generate power at Hoover Dam is 1,050 feet, according to the National Park Service. Below this level, the reservoir would be considered an “inactive pool.” However, Patti Aaron, public affairs officer for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado region told the Boulder City Review back in May that Hoover Dam will still be able to produce hydropower below this level. She stated the new threshold where the dam would no longer be able to produce power is at 950 feet.

Should the water levels fall below 895 feet, the reservoir will become a dead pool, meaning water levels will be too low to reach the lowest water outlet at Hoover Dam and flow downstream.

It's an axiom in business: If you have a product that you can't keep in stock, check your prices. You're selling you're product at too low a price.

In this case, water is the product, and the reason it's in short supply is because it's being sold too cheaply, mainly to farmers who turned desert into farm fields. And during times of drought, naturally they use more water because it's still being sold at the same price.

If you set the price of water to realistic levels, farmers certainly won't like it, and they'll use less water and more drought-resistant crops.

The free market always has a solution.

Onward and upward,
airforce

I figured out how to watch these videos quicker. I right click the video and choose "copy video URL" then I past it and watch it directly on Youtube and click settings - playback speed, select 2x speed, and turn on captions.

If farmers have to irrigate anything except for vegetables for human consumption then they should be growing a different crop. The underground water tables used for irrigation are in danger of being depleted. Good farmers don't run irrigation.



"In parts of the United States, sixty years of the profitable business of intensive farming using huge center-pivot irrigators has emptied parts of the Ogallala Aquifer (also known as the High Plains Aquifer). One of the world's largest aquifers, it covers an area of approximately 450,000 km2 (170,000 sq mi) in portions of the eight states of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas, beneath the Great Plains in the United States. The total water extraction from center-pivot irrigation in the area is estimated to be about 5.42 million acre-feet of water per year."

"In 1950, irrigated cropland covered 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres). With the use of center-pivot irrigation, nearly 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) of land were irrigated in Kansas alone. At some places, during maximum extraction, the water table dropped more than 1.5 m (5 ft) per year. In extreme cases, wells had to be greatly deepened to reach the steadily falling water table. In some places in the Texas Panhandle, the water table has been drained (dewatered). "Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile [160 km] swath of the aquifer has already gone dry." It would take hundreds to thousands of years of rainfall to replace the groundwater in the dried up aquifer."

source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation

Thanks!

Onward and upward,
airforce