Engineering our way out of drought

I recently came back from seeing the folks at Nest Labs in Palo Alto, California. Great people, great bundle of products — more on that later. But that’s not what’s on my mind right now. Driving back and forth from San Francisco International Airport and Palo Alto, I was looking at an endless landscape of brown. This is San Francisco, you know, the foggy, rainy part of California. Instead, Northern California has experienced record warmth and sunshine, turning the hills into brown grass and desiccated trees and brush.

I came across a terrific article in, of all places, BuzzFeed, written by Michelle Nijhuis, who has also written for more traditional outlets such as National Geographic. Nijhuis tells the tale of the North American Water & Power Alliance (http://bzfd.it/1P1Lbao), an idea developed by Ralph Parsons, the founder of the consulting engineering firm Parsons Corp., to pipe massive amounts of water on a continent-wide scale from places where there’s a lot of water, such as Canada and the Great Lakes, to places where it was scarce in the West. It was the early 1960s when we all believed in the power of engineering big things, like going to the moon.

Parsons didn’t originate the idea — he had heard it from a Los Angeles water utility engineer. He did, however, have an engineering staff that could flesh it out.

Nijhuis begins the story by recounting a wildfire that burned through the tony Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air in 1961 that destroyed 500 homes. Parsons, who started his first company in 1934, had gained a lot of experience by performing military contracts from Turkey to Thailand, and the firm had particular expertise in water development. The company unveiled a 250-page plan for the North American Water & Power Alliance, commonly referred to as NAWAPA, in 1964.

From an engineering standpoint, it was (and is) technologically possible to pipe massive quantities of water from one end of the continent to the other.

There was plenty of water on the continent, Parsons declared, but nature was doing a poor job of doling it out in the right proportions and locations. The scale of NAWAPA was truly continent-wide, moving water from Canada, the Midwest and East as far south as northern Mexico.

Nijhuis quotes from the Parsons NAWAPA report, “Water is now our number one continental problem and must be solved on a continental scale,” [the report] declared. “The North American Water and Power Alliance will take advantage of the geography and climatology of the North American Continent, utilizing the excess water of the high yield watersheds of the far northwestern land masses by distributing it to the water deficient areas of Canada, the United States, and northern Mexico in sufficient quantities to assure adequate water supplies [for] the next one hundred years or more.”

From an engineering standpoint, it was (and is) technologically possible to pipe massive quantities of water from one end of the continent to the other. Whether it’s practical is another question. It would have been hugely expensive (up to $1.5 trillion in today’s dollars), not counting how much it would have cost to forcibly take over Canada, which probably would have been necessary.

Oddly enough, although NAWAPA was never built, it’s never died, either.

“For those of us who work in the water world, NAWAPA is a constant presence,” Nijhuis quotes Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute. “It’s the most grandiose water-engineering project ever conceived for North America. It’s both a monument to the ingenuity of America and a monument to the folly of the 20th century.”