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I have been interested in Wind energy and how it can be used for several years. One possible use I think it might be used for would be moving flood waters from flooded areas to areas of the country where it could be used to RECHARGE underground aquifers.
I am not a computer GURU but I love fiddling around with Google.maps.
I am sure that somebody with more computer savvy than I have could use Google.maps to layout routes where pipelines could be built to move these surplus waters to areas of the country where it could be used.
Do any of you on this forum have that ability?
This might be a great career for some of you just graduating from College and looking for work. Or maybe somebody with a lot of investment capital might see this and investigate the possibilities.
I put the idea out there. Hopefully some of you with the knowledge can do something with it.
You can certainly back off far enough in Google Earth to see the dendritic drainage patterns of larger areas as well as much of the detailed water flow patterns where water erosion is evident. However, out here on the very flat High Plains you are sometimes hard pressed to tell run off patterns in some smaller acreages without actual ground surveys or topographical maps. I've been trying to look at water flow across twenty acres of my place but we get so little rain out here I've not had much opportunity to actually observe it.
Each County should have topo maps of the area that I think would be more helpful than Google maps. However, Google Earth is a good free resource for a start looking.
It is a tempting idea, but the age of great projects in the U.S. has passed. You could not directly inject floodwaters into an aquifer even if you had the wellhead capacity to do it. You would contaminate the aquifer and clog the wellheads with silt in short order. The alternative means allowing giant retention ponds or mixing flood water (say from the Mississippi) into existing reservoirs like Lake Mead, which is seriously low. The environmentalists would have an organic cow. Doing so could introduce pest organisms, kill native waterlife, disrupt "natural" cycles, and so on. Finding land to use as a retention pond would be met with opposition as well.
When you place those difficulties on top of the power requirements to pump that much water uphill, and the speed required to get the job done, and it becomes a pipe dream. You quite literally would have to use more than double the power generated by Hoover Dam to fill the reservoir behind it. Flood control dams and designated flood areas are more cost effective and have less impact.
It is a tempting idea, but the age of great projects in the U.S. has passed. You could not directly inject floodwaters into an aquifer even if you had the wellhead capacity to do it. You would contaminate the aquifer and clog the wellheads with silt in short order. The alternative means allowing giant retention ponds or mixing flood water (say from the Mississippi) into existing reservoirs like Lake Mead, which is seriously low. The environmentalists would have an organic cow. Doing so could introduce pest organisms, kill native waterlife, disrupt "natural" cycles, and so on. Finding land to use as a retention pond would be met with opposition as well.
When you place those difficulties on top of the power requirements to pump that much water uphill, and the speed required to get the job done, and it becomes a pipe dream. You quite literally would have to use more than double the power generated by Hoover Dam to fill the reservoir behind it. Flood control dams and designated flood areas are more cost effective and have less impact.
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You may be right Harry but I'll bet nobody has even attempted to figure it out.
Some of the problems you listed can be overcome.
Look at the last issue of Popular Science for an example of how to filter debris from floodwaters. Pretty simple actually.
In parts of Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Texas there are sandy soils where flood waters could be filtered by the sandy soil and cleansed before making it to the underground aquifer. Plus land is cheap in those areas and recreational water is a big asset.
An example of underground recharging can be seen in some of the canal projects in the Ogallala and North Platte Nebraska canal systems.
Building the pipeline and wind power systems to do this will be big capital expenditures.
I will be patenting a NEW type of wind power system that will reduce the costs of wind generation. I think THAT part of the plan would be doable. Over coming the red tape of building a pipeline would be the biggest obstacle. RED TAPE is the largest problem to overcome in any worthwhile project.
I don't think pollution is going to be as big a problem as you think. Most floods don't happen in a few hours. There is usually a bit of lead time and people that have dangerous chemicals etc in a known flood prone area store them with that in mind. New Orleans was not the norm for pollution in floods. New Orleans has been a cesspool of toxic pollution for decades.
There's too much "stuff"...from oil on the roads to fertilizer and pesticides on the fields that gets mixed in with the floodwaters.
It's worse in the cities...the sewers overflow during a flood.
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There is a thing called dilution. When you are talking a few billion gallons of water the SMALL amount of pollutants like oil, fertilizers and pesticides are insignificant. Most pesticides and herbicides are biodegradable also. Heavy metal contamination is tightly regulated and if there are businesses in a FLOOD PLAIN that could be responsible for contamination during a fllod some regulator is screwing the pooch.
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There is a thing called dilution. When you are talking a few billion gallons of water the SMALL amount of pollutants like oil, fertilizers and pesticides are insignificant. Most pesticides and herbicides are biodegradable also. Heavy metal contamination is tightly regulated and if there are businesses in a FLOOD PLAIN that could be responsible for contamination during a fllod some regulator is screwing the pooch.
GL2
Fine.
Next time there's a major flood in the United States, would some one please fill up several five gallon jugs and ship them to GL2 so that he and his family can use the "diluted" flood water for their personal consumption?
There's an actual reason why FEMA ships bottled water to areas of flood disasters. There's a reason why flooded basements and homes have to be scrubbed down with bleach. There's a reason why flooded homeowners have to throw away their flood-damaged possessions.
There was a series of articles in the Detroit Free Press on August 9, 2009, concerning the contamination of ground water in western Michigan due to the practice of local food processors spraying wastewater onto fields. The homeowners are now forced to abandon their wells and hook up to a city water system. The original thought behind the practice was that the waste water would be filtered and diluted by spraying onto fields.
I'm sorry GL2, but reality is disagreeing with your assumptions.
Next time there's a major flood in the United States, would some one please fill up several five gallon jugs and ship them to GL2 so that he and his family can use the "diluted" flood water for their personal consumption?
There's an actual reason why FEMA ships bottled water to areas of flood disasters. There's a reason why flooded basements and homes have to be scrubbed down with bleach. There's a reason why flooded homeowners have to throw away their flood-damaged possessions.
There was a series of articles in the Detroit Free Press on August 9, 2009, concerning the contamination of ground water in western Michigan due to the practice of local food processors spraying wastewater onto fields. The homeowners are now forced to abandon their wells and hook up to a city water system. The original thought behind the practice was that the waste water would be filtered and diluted by spraying onto fields.
I'm sorry GL2, but reality is disagreeing with your assumptions.
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The reality is that water CAN BE TREATED. Any city over 1000 in population in the United States has sewage treatment plants. You do your morning rituals of S, S, and S and the water you flushed down your commode, shower or kitchen sink goes into the local sewage treatment facility. The water is treated and then released into a local stream, river or lake and then a water treatment plant treats that water and it ends up in your kitchen tap and you drink it.
The example you give in Western Michigan is from an irresponsible use of water. Many irrigators have inadvertantly contaminated groundwater by NOT having the proper backflush valves in place in their pumping systems. The contaminated water is accidentally backflushed back into the underground water supply instead of being used on the surface croplands. Irrigators in Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska have had to have the proper equipment in place since the 1980's to prevent this from happening. Since Michigan is not a state that relies on irrigation for crops, it sounds like they are making the same mistakes that other states made forty years ago.
The reality is that water CAN BE TREATED. Any city over 1000 in population in the United States has sewage treatment plants. You do your morning rituals of S, S, and S and the water you flushed down your commode, shower or kitchen sink goes into the local sewage treatment facility. The water is treated and then released into a local stream, river or lake and then a water treatment plant treats that water and it ends up in your kitchen tap and you drink it.
I'm glad to see that we are now in agreement. You had been claiming that contaminated flood waters would simply be cleaned by diffusion. Yes, if you wish to reclaim foul, filthy floodwater, then you would have to clean it up somehow.
Regarding the reuse of sewage water, did you ever notice that cities always have their water sources upstream and their treated sewage discharge downstream? Probably something to due with it being easier/cheaper to use relatively cleaner water than sewage water for producing drinking water.
Trust me, no one in Detroit brushes their teeth with treated water originally obtained from Detroit's sewers. However, I do pity the water consumers of Ohio.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gunluvver2
The example you give in Western Michigan is from an irresponsible use of water. Many irrigators have inadvertantly contaminated groundwater by NOT having the proper backflush valves in place in their pumping systems. The contaminated water is accidentally backflushed back into the underground water supply instead of being used on the surface croplands. Irrigators in Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska have had to have the proper equipment in place since the 1980's to prevent this from happening.
Perhaps it really wasn't fair of me to provide a link to the Detroit Free Press articles, but I assumed that if you were going to comment on the situation then you'd be curious enough to locate the articles via www.freep.com or Google so that you might respond in an informed manner.
Bad on me...here's the link Companies faced with changing decades-old disposal method | Detroit Free Press | Freep.com (http://www.freep.com/article/20090809/NEWS05/908090454/Companies+faced+with+changing+decades-old+disposal+method - broken link)
It wasn't a mistake by irrigators that poisoned the groundwater in parts of western Michigan, it was a decades-old accepted practice by food processors like Coca Cola and Birdseye Foods that contaminated it. These companies were spraying waste water from their food processing factories onto empty fields simply to dispose of their waste water from their food production. All of the companies involved (and the Michigan government) believed that natural diffusion would filter out the contaminants in the waste water before that water reached the water table. There wasn't any accidental backflush into the underground water supply; the waste water wasn't ever hooked into the water supply -- it was simply sprayed from collection tanks directly onto fields.
The reason why I brought up the situation in western Michigan is because it seemed to parallel exactly what you were proposing: to take contaminated water and introduce it into the Ogallala Aquifier to recharge it. You even mentioned using the sandy soils of the local areas to filter the water; that's exactly what Coca Cola and Birdseye Foods were attempting to accomplish. If it didn't work on a small scale in western Michigan, why would it work on a much more immense scale on the Great Plains?
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