Yay!

We ended up getting 1.41" of rain in 2 days.. which is HUGE considering we've gotten a total of 2.32" of precipitation this YEAR.

Gloria - I was talking to DH a few days ago about how all the floodwaters are going to be wasted. How is it that we can spend gazillions of dollars on wars all around the world, and we can't figure out how to divert floodwaters so that people's homes/farms aren't flooded? The frickin' ROMANS figured out how to transport water 2000+ years ago. Why on earth can't we built a network of underground piping/dikes/aquaducts to move that water down to the southwest, where it's truly needed? I bet dollars to donuts that parched & burnt Texas & NM would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have some of this water.. and it's just going to flow down into the gulf of mexico, unused and wasted.

One niggling point is that the Romans used gravity to transport their water. We would have to use pumps and pipe. Another is that they were moving water tens of miles, we're talking thousands of miles.

That said, if we made water nearly as important in the grand scheme of things as the Romans did - if we designated a similar portion of our GNP to water as they did, I bet you could water your roses all day long and nobody would care. Let's see...

$1 trillion (a significant fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan) would buy a lot of water pumps and pipe.

The Alyeska pipeline, http://www.alyeska-pipe.com/pi... is 48 inches in diameter and 800 miles long. It cost $8 billion to build. It would probably about $32 billion in today's dollars, but some of the engineering and construction techniques required to build oil pipeline across tundra might not apply to water pipe. Maybe we'd save 30%. So maybe you could get four pipelines per $100 billion, or forty per $trillion. The Alyeska pipeline has delivered 15 billion barrels of oil in 30 years - thats 500,000 bbl/year of crude which is much harder to transport than water.

Figure you could push five times as much water through or 2.5 million bbl water/year = 130 million gallons of water per year for each pipeline. Forty pipelines would deliver something like seven billion gallons of water per year. That's equal to about 22,000 acre-feet. A square mile is about 640 acres. And the average rainfall in CO flatlands is about 12 inches. So you could transport in a year about as much water as you would catch in thirty square miles in a year (assuming no evaporative losses, etc.) Of course, if you used much larger diameter pipe constructed of cheaper materials, the cost might be materially less.

Looked at another way, it has cost about $.50 per bbl or $.10 per gallon to transport crude oil 800 miles across Alaska (excluding operating costs). Transporting water using a pipeline would probably be about a fifth the price or about $.02 per gallon. That is a great deal for high-value things like drinking or bathing. But it's still expensive for watering crops and lawns.

I've been wanting to do that calculation for some time.

Steve - True, but a LOT less expensive than building houses w/o any water. A new subdivision was approved here in my county.. and there's only like 0.40 acre-foot of water per house.. and they want to build 12,000 houses!! Water's in pretty short supply here in the Denver metro.. it all ends up going downriver to NV/AZ to water their lawns. LOL. (just pickin' on ya).

And the eastern flatlands of CO don't need it.. they get 5 times the rain we do.

But I *LOVE* how you actually thought about it & broke it down.. very scientific & methodical! And STILL cheaper than spending $$ on wars that the US populace doesn't want. Not to mention how the price of flood insurance would go down & how many people's lives would be made easier in the midwest/Atlantic states if we were able to harvest those flood waters that seem to hit that area often.. even the hurricanes that hit the gulf coast could be harvested. We could make Death Valley into another Lake Mead.

Impressive calculations, Steve. I just wondered as I read, what you were actually supposed to be doing when you diverted your attention to this problem...

Toni: the obvious solution to the subdivision's water problem is not to build so many new houses. Subdivisions are over running the countryside and cities are empty.

PPal -isn't that the honest to god's truth? Right right RIGHT next to this new subdivision is the city of Highland's Ranch, which, for about 2-3 years, was the city with the highest number of foreclosures in the state. However, Denver proper, the actual city of Denver, really isn't that empty.. it's pretty full as far as property's being lived in, unlike a lot of blighted cities where the inner city is boarded up & houses are empty everywhere. There *are* some cities in our metro that are kinda like that, Thornton comes to mind, but the metro has really really worked hard to keep that from happening. Property values here never really sky-rocketed horrifically like in some parts of the country... my house is worth about the same now as when I bought it back in '05, so I'm pretty happy about that. We do have some properties in Cherry Hills (where the Denver Broncos/Denver Nuggets/rich multimillionaires live) that plummeted like a rock (remember one house built and was trying to be sold for $4mil, was auctioned off for like $1.2mil), but for the most part, as long as you bought reasonable, you kept reasonable. If you bought WAAAAAAAAY too much house (and almost all the new houses built these days are a MINIMUM of 3000sqft.. mine's a little dinky 880sqft (not including basement) house), then you got screwed. Plus the banks were giving out loans to anyone & everyone, didn't matter if you had a job or not. Just in the 10 years I've lived in Colorado I've seen the population EXPLODE ridiculously.

And maybe Steve's a Civil Engineer and this has been a pet project of his? Whatever he was supposed to be doing, he's obviously 1 smart cookie!

holy cow I just got home from work but I think you guys were working harder than I was LOL
Gloria

Gloria - No, it's that you're a lot busier than I am. Most of the time, at work (where I sit as I type this) I'm bored out of my mind stiff. I usually have about 2-3 hours of busywork, followed by 6 hours of ZZzZzzzZZZZzzZZZZZzzzzz...

you can come work with me ;0) to day I cut porterhouse -T bone -boneless serlion new york and rib eye steaks then center cut and loin pork chops then I had to make both burgers wait on customers and fix lunch for all the people !!! and yyyyaaaa I have the week end off oh I forgot I had to smoke jerky too

Toni, all of us downstream of Colorado are truly grateful for your generous contribution of mountain water to our lawns and gardens. Here in Prescott, the surrounding mountains catch rainwater and most of our supply comes from local rainfall. Fortunately, it's enough water for a small town, but not so much as to be claimed as a water resource by Phoenix. There is an ongoing project to import water from a place 20 miles north of us which is contested by Phoenix, which is 80 miles to the south. I have been told that it costs $40,000 just to get a building permit for a new house here because of the difficulty getting new water. I believe it. We are putting an addition on our house and the city said that with the number of fixtures we'd need to upsize our water meter. The permitting cost alone of doing that would have added $5000 to the project, so we eliminated a fixture inside the existing house which allowed us not to upgrade. Permitting costs that account for water resources can slow down rampant new development. And I agree that .4 acre-foot per house doesn't seem like enough - not if any irrigation of the garden is allowed.

Porkpal, I'm lucky enough to be able to make my own schedule. And there is an engineering degree or two in my history.

I thought as much. I just figured your complex calculations seemed like the sort of thing I might launch into when I was avoiding doing something else. I thought the whole convoluted logic was great fun.

More snow in the mountains. Only about 25 feet in places.

http://www.aspentimes.com/arti...

In the past week, we've gotten over 3" of rain here in the Denver metro. That puts us over an inch over our normals. But you know what? You can't tell. Everything's finally greening up, but with the extreme drought that we had with no snow, it's almost too late for here in the Metro. The trees, yea, they're greening up, but the crabapple/apple/pear/cherry harvests are going to be scanty, if at all (had a late frost that killed a lot of flowers). It's partially sunny right now, first time this week I've seen blue sky & the sun. Gonna be pretty this weekend, then back to rain & storms. Memorial Day weekend is supposed to be in the 80s!!!

Better late than never I guess.

It's making me glad we didn't choose Ft. Collins. It would seem a waste to have water fall only when it's not needed. In the little valley where my house is situated February and March snow and rain run downhill both in the stream and in the soil beneath. So even with no rain for half of March and all of April, the annual grasses have been growing like crazy.

Over the last week or so rain, temperatures below 60F, and high winds have conspired to make it less than perfect May weather here, either. But I think the roses have been happy. Still, the only roses in bloom are the $5 roses from Lowes. The dianthus have been blooming like mad and the garden smells like an apple pie with cinnamon and clove. Several iris are pitching in, too. When it's not too windy and cold I could just sit there forever. Or at least until lunch.

We've had an extremely windy, warm, and DRY spring and yet my roses are all surviving. Some have even started their second flush of blooms. They are all well established and acclimated. Tough plants!

*sigh* nice! Steve - you need to take some pics!! You too PPal, give me something to look forward to!

Steve - You wouldn't wanted to be in Ft. Collins yesterday.. horrific hail for 2 days. Bad bad storms. North always gets slammed harder than me in the south.. I'm like in a teeny bubble that I pray never bursts.. I'm usually protected from all yucky weather.

How big was the Ft. Collins hail?
We finally got some rain last night. Figures...my remodelers just got our new entryway framed but no roof, so they put a blue tarp up. The rain was so noisy on the tarp and it made me think I was sleeping in a tent. Old memories there!
Glad the tarp didn't leak like most tents do.

LOL

Go from record dryness in the winter w/a record of lack of snowfall to almost the rainiest May in Denver's history. We've gotten almost 4.5" in 2 weeks.

http://www.denverpost.com/news...

Cindi - It's not the size, it's the amount. They got like 3-4" of hail. All pea-sized, but that's still a lot of hail.

I feel your pain. I just garden between the raindrops. Hubby is trying to get the house scraped and primed for painting. His lack of progress has pushed my side yard garden with a rose hedge and a lovely path ending in an arbor to the backyard (sigh) back to next summer.

We finally started getting a bit of rain last night. We dodged all the hail and tornadoes but we sure picked up the wind! It's going to take me forever to pick up all the limbs before I can mow again. I have new plants sitting in tubs in the yard and it looks like there's less than an inch of rain in them. I'll take what I can get, I guess.
The grass is noticeably greener today and the daylilies are lush! Poor roses, their petals are everywhere.

Cindi glad your okay you could have a bon fire with all the sticks and cook some hot dogs
Gloria