Friday, October 14, 2011
Water
The fascination with the watery affairs of the western US continues unabated. So yesterday we watched a much younger Jack Nicholson in 'Chinatown', a film which we had not seen before and which has worn pretty well for its 40 years. For some reason Jack Nicholson managed to remind me of both Sean Connery and Frank Sinatra.
Then there was the perusal of the web site of the people who managed the delta area of the Sacramento river.
And then there was the perusal of the watery pages of my Polish Army Atlas. Where, in passing, I learn about splendid things called amphidromic points. Defined in the 1987 Manual of Navigation from the Admiralty as places on the ocean from where co-tidal lines tend to radiate out from. Co-tidal lines being rather like contour lines, but linking up places which have the same tide times. Tides at amphidromic points tend to be a bit tricky. All to do with the tendency of continuous maps from a surface onto itself to have fixed points.
To assist my reading I have compiled a list of parties who might have interest in any particular water project, a list which follows. All the parties who have to be squared away, or perhaps disposed of if 'Chinatown' was anything to go by.
Civil servants who want to grow their empires.
Engineers who love building things. The bigger the better.
Congressmen who want projects in their areas.
Senators who want a monument to their term on this earth. Needs to be named for them to really score here.
White water enthusiasts who like unspoiled rivers. President Carter was one of these, on which account he got a lot of hate mail from dam buffs.
Fishing enthusiasts who like unspoiled rivers.
Water sports enthusiasts who like the large lakes created by dams.
Long hairs who are into the environment generally. Quite apt also to be recreational drug users.
Civil engineering companies who love building things for the government. Dams good, tunnels better.
Manufacturers of earth moving and tunnelling machinery. Manufacturers of big pipes, turbines and pumps. Manufacturers of cement. Manufacturers of irrigation machinery.
Voters who live in the flood plain of a temperamental river.
Voters who live somewhere which is going to be flooded by a dam.
Voters who like cheap electricity.
Eastern voters who don’t like subsidising western ones with Federal money.
Power companies who don’t like competition from cheap Federal hydro.
Manufacturing companies who need a lot of cheap power.
Farmers who will get cheap water.
Farmers who won’t be getting cheap water but have to compete with those that do.
Voters who live in big hot towns like Los Angeles and who like both to shower and to water their lawns. And to stay cool.
Land speculators who make a lot of money out of big hot towns like Los Angeles getting bigger and hotter.
Lawyers who do well out of all the big money schemozzle.
Farmers who like big bad aqueducts which leak someone else’s water into their gravel from where they can pump it up onto their land for free.
Voters in area A who would rather waste their water on some dumb water project than let those greedy sonsofbitches in area B have it.
I close with a new-to-me prophecy of doom. It seems that once upon a time all the seas were fresh. Then over the years, all the salt and other stuff washed down into them from the hills, making them saltier and saltier. Evaporation of the water from the surface further increases the concentration. So small seas like the Dead Sea have already had it. The Caspian Sea is on the way. And the Pacific Ocean is to come. So if global warming doesn't get us, salt will.
# posted by Jim @ 6:01 AM 
