COMMENTARY: How to save our water supply
Last November, the Department of Interior released five proposed alternatives to manage Colorado River water after December 2026, when current guidelines expire. None of these alternatives brings new water to the Colorado River.
We believe it is imperative to bring new water to the Colorado if we want to sustain the Colorado Basin system. This basin contributes at least $1.4 trillion in GDP, serves more than 40 million people with water and irrigates 5.5 million acres of farmland producing tens of billions of dollars worth of food for the entire country.
Las Vegas and the rest of the Southwest could not exist in their current form without that water from the Colorado River.
Lakes Mead and Powell, which feed the water for the lower Colorado Basin, have a combined capacity of 16.4 trillion gallons. As of late May, they contain just 5.2 trillion gallons (31.9 percent of capacity). To get to even 50 percent capacity we would need to bring 3 trillion gallons of new water to the Glen Canyon Dam and then let it flow downriver using the current infrastructure.
There are two places in the United States that could provide the necessary water: the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana and the Lake Tahoe outflow on the California, Nevada border.
The Atchafalaya River drains 30 percent of the entire Mississippi watershed into the Gulf of Mexico without generating any electricity or providing commercial shipping. As of late May, this river is discharging 2.970 million gallons per second into the Gulf, and the long-term average for the past 60 years has been 1.4 million gallons per second, according to rivergages.com.
If a 1,200-mile aqueduct with just 2 percent of the Atchafalaya’s average flow were built from Vidalia, Louisiana, to the Glen Canyon dam, we could get that 3 trillion gallons in approximately three years.
Lake Tahoe contains 40 trillion gallons of water, more than twice the capacity of Lakes Mead and Powell combined. The outflow averages 212 billion gallons per year (6,700 gallons per second). Building an aqueduct of half that would clearly help the water shortage in Lakes Powell and Mead. The advantage of this route is that it is all downhill from 6,200 feet at Lake Tahoe to Glen Canyon’s 3,500 feet. It is 500 miles shorter, so little electricity if any would be needed.
Of course, the ecological impact of cutting back the flow into the Truckee River, the only outlet of Lake Tahoe, needs to be considered. But because the Tahoe outflow provides only 30 percent of the water in the Truckee River, we don’t think that would be a problem. The Truckee River simply flows into Pyramid Lake and evaporates without flowing to the ocean.
Furthermore, the water in Lake Tahoe is “navigable waters of the United States” just like lakes Mead, Powell and Havasu. This means the water is controlled by the Bureau of Reclamation, not California or Nevada.
Adopting one or both of these alternatives would greatly contribute to solving the Colorado River water shortage.
The engineering to build and maintain such aqueducts and pipelines is well-known and has been used repeatedly in our nation’s history. The problem is financing. We estimate the cost of the Atchafalaya route to be on the order of building 1,200 miles of new interstate highway, approximately $15 billion. The Lake Tahoe route would be approximately $20 billion because there would be more mountain valleys to traverse.
Financing would come from a new National Infrastructure Bank. A similar institution financed Hoover and Parker dams and two large oil pipelines in World War II. There is a bill in Congress, HR4052, that would create a $5 trillion National Infrastructure Bank to do just this. It would require no new federal spending or new federal taxes. There are currently 48 sponsors of this bill, but none from Nevada.
We urge Nevada Reps. Dina Titus, Susie Lee, Mark Amodei and Steven Horsford to sign on as co-sponsors of this bill.
Alphecca Muttardy is a macroeconomist with the Coalition for a National Infrastructure Bank (NIBCoalition.com), and 25-year veteran of the International Monetary Fund. Don Siefkes represents the coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area. They can be reached at, amuttardy@gmail.com and donsiefkes@aol.com, respectively.
