"Well There's Your Problem" on the collapse of the St Francis Dam, mentioned in Grady's video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxLgM1vnuUA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxLgM1vnuUA</a><p>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
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.
I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all, but LA doesn't either?<p>My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.
The LA water system is dependent on power as a whole. There’s many pumping stations along the various aqueducts.
I really dig the editorial viewpoint of this article. New journalism style meets fun facts about engineering.
I 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: <a href="https://www.mountainproject.com/area/105843226/owens-river-gorge" rel="nofollow">https://www.mountainproject.com/area/105843226/owens-river-g...</a>
Sometimes 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.
You mean, like NYC Water Tunnel #3?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....</a>
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.<p>I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
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.
I 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.
I wonder at what point the up-front costs of massive desalination would overcome the (often hidden and externalized) costs of projects like this.
> <i>the up-front costs of massive desalination</i><p>Desalination is dominated by operating costs.
I don’t think the brine pollutant issue has been meaningfully solved. You are also now pumping water inland uphill the whole way.
For usage where the water mostly returns as sewage, is treated and then returned to the ocean, you can just dilute the brine with the treated discharge and then it returns at basically the original salinity.
Nice picture but I've never seen the water anywhere near blue like that.
I think it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos.
That's a youtube thumbnail. I believe it's been altered, which also explains the strange brown substance that looks out of place.<p>Most of the video content has the correct coloring, from my experience observing the aqueduct.
If anyone wants a deep dive on this subject: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert</a>
The California aquaduct system is an engineering marvel.
Really enjoyed watching that. Good luck with water LA.