Fogbow

It looked like a glacier calving.

Something similar at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in 2021. Geologists call it mass wasting.

Northern Italian drought.

Tule Lake and its eponymous city, Tulelake in north central California's Siskiyou County:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/as-tu ... li=BBnbfcL

The area is known for growing potatoes and at one time, horse radish.

“As water crisis worsens on Colorado River, an urgent call for Western states to ‘act now’”:
https://www.latimes.com/environment/sto ... to-act-now

“With the Colorado River’s depleted reservoirs continuing to drop to new lows, the federal government has taken the unprecedented step of telling the seven Western states that rely on the river to find ways of drastically cutting the amount of water they take in the next two months.”

when a municipality intends to hijack a state water resource...

Why do they insist on developing dry, barren deserts into habitable communities? Seems an expensive burdensome task. Lots of places to live that are ready to go naturally.

The land is cheap.

Uninformed wrote: ↑Fri Jun 24, 2022 7:29 am “As water crisis worsens on Colorado River, an urgent call for Western states to ‘act now’”:
https://www.latimes.com/environment/sto ... to-act-now

“With the Colorado River’s depleted reservoirs continuing to drop to new lows, the federal government has taken the unprecedented step of telling the seven Western states that rely on the river to find ways of drastically cutting the amount of water they take in the next two months.”

All these stories point out the stupidity of not convincing people that having more than two children places a huge strain on the capacity of certain places on earth to sustain life.

I know all of you love your grandkids, but sooner or later everyone will have to reckon with not having enough water available.

Sooner rather than later. This year’s drought monitor is horrifying, and I thought in previous years how much worse can it get?

The words I didn't hear in either of those videos was "climate change." These people are living a pipe dream, and there's not enough water to fill it.

What astonished me was the self-centered approach. "We" will grow by 2060 to 2 million residents, give us the water N.O.W! No word what the water will cost the future residents after paying projected $2 billion for the water conduit. No planning on how future "imported" water prices could develop, surely not getting cheaper. Who will want to live in this city at those water prices (should water be available). No consideration that other communities have their own development plans and will request their share. One wonders what projections the state (AZ) has to divide the scarce resource between competing sectors like farming, residential, industrial and recreational.

We’ve known for more than 50 years that this day would come. Back in the late 70s it was a much-discussed topic among people who were interested in that sort of thing. Private water companies began buying bankrupt utilities in tiny towns all over the world, and then non-bankrupt utilities and then, like the private fire departments, they figured that was an interesting income stream so they focused on wealthy communities. It’s one of the reasons the rich think they’ll come out of climate disaster with not only their lives and wealth intact but also owning everything of ours, as civilization collapses and they’re the Last Men Standing.

And then, just like everything else, people stopped talking about it, like the problem had just gone away but really they didn’t want us to change our capitalist ways, (both they and we - we don’t want to give up our cheap almonds and avocados just because our great-grandkids may not have water). And now people are so surprised it’s really happening.

Thé Colorado River, which so many in the West - almost everyone, actually - rely on for water is drying up. Desalinization is almost a reality, technically, except that the environmental costs are sky high. We haven’t figured that out yet. To make things crazier, there’s a norovirus outbreak among the river rafting population which is spreading it all over. I don’t think they’ve figured out the source yet but since May there have been 118 cases, higher than other years. The sick rafters vomit and poop in the river and side tributaries and now the virus is measurable *in the river* in the vicinity of all those vacationers.

We are so screwed.

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 26, 2022 3:50 pm Desalinization is almost a reality, technically, except that the environmental costs are sky high. We haven’t figured that out yet.

Desalinization takes a lot of energy. I was reading up on it a week ago, because my farrier wanted to know why California doesn't desalinate water.

Uses outrageous amounts of electricity (water must be forced through a membrane which will catch the salt molecules, in effect it's like a pressure washer). Places like Texas already are stretched to the limit with their electrical grid.

Destruction of wildlife because the intakes will suck up not just water, but fish and their eggs.

The necessity of getting rid of concentrated brine safely.

Where are you going to put this plant, and will it be earthquake safe?

https://www.history.com/topics/landmark ... s-aqueduct

By the 1920s, William Mulholland was already searching for more water for the still-growing Los Angeles region, and was pushing for the building of an aqueduct and a dam on the mighty Colorado River. This ambitious idea would come to pass in 1939--four years after Mulholland's death--with the completion of Hoover Dam.

Awesome! Watched it last night.

More locally…

Two of our grandkids are visiting (12 and 15). The 12-yo called me on the phone from upstairs at 11:30 last night: “Grandma, I hope I didn’t wake you, but I was in the middle of my shower and the water stopped running and I still have shampoo in my hair.”

The only thing I knew how to check was the breaker for the well pump and it was not tripped. I woke up my husband and he checked what he could but couldn’t find the problem - it was either the capacitor or the well pump, and he’d need to call the well guy. Meanwhile I gave my granddaughter some bottled water so she could rinse the soap from her hair. I offered to heat it on the stove but she said it was OK at room temperature (then regretted that - she said it was cold).

We have sources at the cabin for both potable and non-potable water in case of emergencies, so we put that plan into action.

For non-potable we have a 300-gallon tank that we keep mainly for flushing in the event the potable tank runs low and we can’t get it filled.

For potable, the cabin has a 2,000 gallon underground cistern for normal household use (last I checked there was still about 1200 gallons).

We filled four containers with 32 total gallons of non-potable water and brought that up for flushing. We brought 4 5-gallon bottles of potable water plus the water cooler up from the cabin, so we were set at least for a few days. If we needed showers we would go to the cabin, or heat up potable water here and pour it over ourselves to wash up.

Anyhoo. Turns out it was the capacitor: a $300 fix with parts and labor; took about 20 minutes. But it was a good exercise for what to do during a power outage. The well guy told us not to run the well pump from the generator in the event of a long-term power outage (he said most generators can’t get the pump running fast enough and will eventually burn out the motor). So we’ll continue to store flushing water here and refill the toilet tanks manually if we have a power failure. We also have a 12-volt sure-flo pump that works on a battery pack we can use to pump potable water out of the cistern to keep our 5-gallon potable water bottles full (we didn’t have to use that this time because the pump at the cabin was working).

I actually love this kind of stuff - having a plan for when things go wrong and having the plan actually work. I’m not a prepper by any means, but we live in BFE and we’re prone to power failures. It’s good to know we don’t have to go rent a hotel room.

Our house is tank (mains electricity to pump), else siphon
or creek to tank (mains electricity to pump or petrol fire pump), else buckets

last option - run a set of garden hoses ~200m to the last house on town water

The Weather Network A glass of ocean water: Quebec company wins award for desalination technology

The company is quickly gaining international recognition for their technologies that purify ocean water solely powered by the motion of ocean waves. The desalination systems are placed on buoys that are anchored 200 metres to three kilometres from the shoreline, a distance that was chosen based on wave height and sightline away from the coast.

A ‘pumping’ action occurs when the buoys rise and fall with the waves, which compresses the seawater and squeezes it through a reverse osmosis membrane. This results in concentrated saltwater being released back into the ocean and clean drinking water being sent to the coastline through an underwater pipeline that is connected to the buoy.

The smallest desalination system consisting of five buoys can produce 50,000 litres per day and larger systems of 100 buoys can produce one million litres per day.