Create a ‘Skunk Works’ Mentality to Help Ease the Western Drought
A 1000-mile Water Pipeline from Lake Michigan to the Colorado River is not a Don Quixote Windmill
In the 1940s, my father worked at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, California when our nation was in dire need of a jet fighter to counter the growing fleet of German war planes. Years later, he told me about the secretive Skunk Works group at Lockheed.
Spearheaded by Clarence “Kelly” L. Johnson and his select team of engineers and mechanics, the Skunk Works deftly designed and built the XP-80, the nation’s first jet fighter, in less than five months! To meet this stressful challenge, Johnson’s created crystal clear efficiency by eschewing the stifling chain-of-command protocol hell-bent on conventional thinking that simultaneously stripped away pure innovation.
With the Western United States in the grips of another dire crisis — our crippling megadrought — is it possible to create a Water Works, a la the streamlined focus of the Skunk Works?
While it’s hopeful the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) secured $4 billion at the last minute for the Bureau of Reclamation to tackle the drought in the Colorado River Basin and across the West; while it’s hopeful that Governor Newsom recently issued a 16-page document labeled as an aggressive plan that “must move smarter and faster to update our water system” and while it’s hopeful the U.S. Interior Department announced 25 water recycling projects, 20 of which are in California, will this collective funding and new round of policy targets and timelines be enough to generate water to somehow sustain life and agriculture as the heat and drought increase over the next decade?
In addition, amidst the ongoing hodgepodge of draconian cuts in water usage, a “triple dip” of the drier La Nina phase is forecast for Winter 2022-2023 by the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center.
Almost all of the bureaucratic proposals by the federal and state governments reek of stale reruns that will only recycle and/or incrementally upgrade everything that’s already been done in the past: adding more desalination plants; capturing more rainwater; reusing more sewer water and greatly expanding water storage capacity above and below ground and the well intentioned but murky “voluntary system conservation projects.”
All of these initiatives are reactive measures designed to circle our water wagons until we hopefully receive a wet El Nino winter in 2023-24. But where is the hair-on-fire, life-or-death 911 urgency and where is the fresh Skunk Works creativity?
To address the oil crisis in 1973 when there was a sharp increase in oil prices, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) was designed and built in three years with 20,000 workers toiling 12-hour days and 7-day weeks that eventually transported oil 800 miles over rugged terrain using 11 pump stations from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, Alaska. Here was yet another national crisis partially addressed by a creative solution in record time.
Isn’t now the time to change our drought narrative from being reactive to creating proactive out-of-the-box initiatives that will provide water insurance during these prolonged years of drought?
With pipelines crisscrossing all over the United States, why can’t we build a water pipeline that runs 1000 miles from Lake Michigan across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and into the Colorado River Basin? It could supplement and help restore the Colorado River which is a lifeline for 40 million people in seven states. During the wet season,
the 1000-mile pipeline could be turned off depending on the volume of the rains and subsequent Colorado snow pack.
And don’t worry, Lake Michigan will hardly miss a drop. Lake Michigan holds approximately 1,200 cubic miles of water, equivalent to one quadrillion gallons. According to satellite measurements, draining about 400 billion gallons from the lake would only decrease its water level by one inch!
When the government and the private sector really want to get something done — a la the XP-80 fighter plane and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline — they can tie together the fiscal forces and political will to make it happen. A 1000-mile water pipeline over four states is not like some Don Quixote windmill or a pipe dream. After all, our nation has a legacy of can-do visionaries who also delivered much more complicated large-scale projects such as the Hoover Dam, a man on the moon and a rover on Mars.
So our children and grandchildren won’t have to suffer from more draconian measures that are simply stop-gaps to an inevitable systemic collapse, surely we can establish a Water Works group to become more proactive and, for starters, fast-track a pipeline to deliver fresh water and renewed hope for a sustainable future throughout the West.
John T. Boal is the author of Be A Global Force Of One!, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Volunteer’s Soul and worked in public service for over 40 years. He lives in Burbank.