The Water Knife


https://www.usbr.gov/projects/index.php?id=504 
Almost 97% of the world’s water is salty or undrinkable and 2% is locked in glaciers and ice caps. That means that all living things on the Earth rely on just 1% of the world’s total
water supply.

The book The Water Knife paints a vibrant picture of what life may look like in the near future if our climate problems aren’t addressed soon. The author Paolo Bacigalupi hones in on life in the Western states of the U.S.-- namely Arizona, and to a lesser extent, Nevada and California.  He describes a world where water is entirely too scarce to support life in the regions that were originally desert. The author makes many mentions of the Central Arizona Water Project (CAP) and its fictitious destruction in his novel. Turns out the CAP is real, and I decided I wanted to learn more about it.

Firstly, in the early 1900s, seven states who share the Colorado River Basin settled on how they were going to share the water. They ended up dividing the river basin into Upper and Lower Basin with each basin given 7.5 million acre-feet (MAF) of water. Arizona was allotted 2.8 MAF of the Lower Basin’s water supply. 1 acre-foot of water provides a year’s worth of water for a family of five.
In 1968 current president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Colorado River Basin Project Act, which permitted the construction of CAP by the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau pf Reclamation. Its purpose: to provide a means of moving 1.5 million acre-feet of Arizona’s water from the Lower Colorado River Basin to the most populated areas of the state. It was also created in the hopes of limiting how much groundwater was used for farming.
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/phoenix/AZ100/1970/photogallery.html

The CAP is a system on canals that extend over 336 miles and raises the water over 2,900 feet in elevation over the course of the system. The system also includes 14 pumping plants, 39 radial gates, more than 50 turnouts that deliver water, and one hydroelectric generator. It is so large that, depending on water flow, water can take up to a week to ravel from beginning to end.  This massive project allowed one of the country’s driest states to also become one of its fastest growing with a current population of over  6 million people. 

Paolo Bacigalupi predicts a dark future for the CAP and the western states. Knowing how important the CAP is to Arizona, I can see exactly how devastating its destruction would be.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 10, 2018 at 8:11 AM

    Wow that is crazy, its scary to think that if CAP was to fail how lost Arizona would be and how true the book would be. I had no clue how much the CAP actually did that is amazing. It also shines light into how powerful CAP truly is and how without it the driest states would be like the book showed them to be.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sfknappOctober 10, 2018 at 11:36 AM

    I didn't know what CAP was before we began reading the Water Knife. A lot of us didn't. It's amazing to know how much it does, but it's also scary to think about what happens if it fails. Great blog post!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousOctober 10, 2018 at 12:20 PM

    Thanks for the information on what CAP is. It's incredible to me how much mankind can do if we put our minds to things. Too bad we don't put our minds to many things anymore. Crazy to know that we are living off of 1% of our natural water supply...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Allen WebbOctober 13, 2018 at 12:28 PM

    It is clearly a massive construction; the question is will it work in a climate change world of drought and increasing water scarcity?

    ReplyDelete

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