Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
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Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#12If anyone wants a deep dive on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
Or another kind of take:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
(Chinatown)
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#13I was surprised to find out it was largely uncovered, though I guess it probably makes it much cheaper to construct. I usually think of aqueducts as pipes or tunnels, like Persian qanāts. I wonder how much water is lost due to evaporation.
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#14I wonder at what point the up-front costs of massive desalination would overcome the (often hidden and externalized) costs of projects like this.
> the up-front costs of massive desalination Desalination is dominated by operating costs.
Correct it's massively energy intensive to filter the salt out the newest best ideas still use ~2 KWh/m3 of water and that's a lab system in perdue that batches the process instead of having it run continuously which is why current RO desalination systems require so much energy.
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#15I was in Owens River Gorge last week, it's a very interesting place. It has some of the tallest single pitch rock climbing in the world, sometimes requiring 80M ropes: https://www.mountainproject.com/area/105843226/owens-river-g...
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#16Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#17"Well There's Your Problem" on the collapse of the St Francis Dam, mentioned in Grady's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxLgM1vnuUA
Also I love when they refer to it as the "_First_ California Water Wars" in a grim realization of the future of water scarcity in the West
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#18Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#19Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
The LA water system is dependent on power as a whole. There’s many pumping stations along the various aqueducts.
Re: The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
#20Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
It’s too complicated to corruptly make money off of a large project like that. It’s much easier to just buy a bunch of drugs and needles and give it to the methheads, or spend money on homeless while building zero homes.