OT. Water Fight??

We have long-term problems in the US West. Precip is very erratic year to year, and people are making things worse, diverting waterways and pumping groundwater at un-sustainable rates.

Houses with wells keep having to drill deeper. A residential well can cost $60K to drill in some places.

This year, the problem will be mass flooding as the snow melts, which is starting about now. Road damage from potholes alone will cost billions to fix.

What are you complaining about, you have a big nice pool of water to the west :-) (the Pacific Ocean)

Desalination plants based on reverse osmosis do not consume a huge amount of electricity, so even solar panels could be used to make fresh water for agriculture. With decentralized desalination units, the solar panels could be on the farms. By keeping them apart, this would be shadowing the plants for only a few hours a day.A big pipe with sea water in and a small pipe with very salty water would be needed while the solar panels would handle the electricity demand locally on the farm.

If you want a more centralized system, a few nuclear power stations at the cost could be used by and using some excess heat for desalination.

There is a problem with that. What do you with the brine output? It is a pollutant.

Here (Murcia, Spain) farmers have being doing that: taking salty water from wells, and dumping the brine into the environment, into the "ramblas", the dry torrents that take rain water to the sea. It is a pollutant, it is one of the reason causing the ecological disaster of the Mar Menor.

Oh, and farmers complain that the water produced by sea desalinization plants is way to expensive to make a profit from agriculture. They want instead more water from rivers up north, which of course is never going to come.

So yes, water wars indeed are ahead, in many parts of the world.

The nasty is newly-created underground streams that make cavities under the road. Not every road extended down to bedrock.

We have several over-30% streets around here. Fun. The sidewalks are often stairs.

I have not heard of 30% slope roman roads. As far as I know, all of them were built with a maximum inclination in order to keep speedy transport. We know of roman roads winding around the mountains as they climb, Spain is very hilly.

Can a horse manage a 30% slope?

Google says the roman roads max'd at 8%.

That is reasonable.

On their aqueducts, they could keep an slope of 0.1% (wikipedia). On a documentary the cited a maximum figure, maybe 0.4%, but I don't remember. Too much and there was too much erosion, too little and there were too many deposits. Amazing engineers they were, for the time.

That Carlsbad plant is quite small compared to many sites in Europe and Asia

The Carlsbad plant has about 200 000 m3/day or 2500 l/s capacity. The plant was powered by 5000 m2 solar panels. Assuming 6 hours of production at 100 W/m2 or 500 kWh/h during 6 daylight hours or 125 kWh as daily average.

If that 20 000 m3/day is divided between only 110 000 inhabitants, each will get nearly 2000 l/day, which should be enough for drinking and a shower.

afaik Gran Canaria get more than 50% of its water from desalination and has agriculture

On Wednesday, April 12, 2023 at 8:14:29 AM UTC-5, Don Y wrote:

Government subsidies? I suspect the farmers are more concerned about getting the entire crop irrigated on time than on the increased evaporation during the day.

It's pretty dry here. Fields here are probably at their most susceptible to blowing. It planting season and the ground is the most worked to get the seed started. I bet the corn planters will barely be out of the field before the center pivots get started. You can thank Frank Zybach in part if you have a nice steak on your plate.

A lot of dirt was blowing today. It was like fog in some places. I met several vehicles on I-80 with their headlights on. Mom used to talk about the Dirty 30s. I guess dirt was blowing from Oklahoma to here in Nebraska. Kansas barbed wire fences didn't stop much. The weather people were talking about record highs today. I'm not terribly surprised when a record high temperature they cite is from the 1930s. Farmers here used to rely on furrow irrigation for the most part. Water running down rows of corn looks nice but it's inefficient. It over irrigates some some spots. Farmers didn't have time to shut down the rows that were through sometimes. The little creek that runs through our farm would sometimes go up during irrigation season despite no rain. Groundwater furnishes almost all of the water for irrigation here. The levels have gone up the last few years. The lowest levels were back in the late 1970s. The state set up Natural Resources Districts to monitor such things. I think that's the trigger point for irrigation control to kick in. The only restriction on irrigation timing is later in the summer. The shutdowns are because of lack of electricity. The farmers get reduced rates if they let the REAs shut down the wells from around 10 AM. until 10 PM. or so. It isn't because of water use but the increased load from air conditioning. God knows we don't want to let some college boy with a tie to break into a sweat.

It's hard to imagine the effect if a farm went from irrigated to dryland because of government edict. The value would drop to maybe half. There's a bit here about the Dutch government trying to interfere with the good old profit motive.

Sri Lanken officials tried to limit nitrogen application for their farmers. .

Certainly. It is the only way, so politicians can not promise they will bring water from rivers in Atlantis.

It is not true. The Romans built winding roads in the mountains of my country. I have seen them.

One time, while riding a bicycle up Alba Road in Santa Cruz (avg gradient 11%), I commented to the the person riding with me that it was nice the road had some sub 8% "steps" in it to get a breather on. He said the road had steps in it because it was an old logging road. It was made that way because the horses could not sustain the work load on the steep sections and needed the flatter sections to recover. Just like cyclists, I suppose. I don't know what a free horse with no load could do, but that probably isn't your question. And I don't know if he was correct regarding why it is the way it is.