No Drought of Far-Out Ideas

The idea sounded beguiling. In a letter to President Carter, California's Representative John Burton wondered whether his drought-stricken state could import snow or runoff water--perhaps by pipeline or railroad--from inundated Eastern areas like Buffalo. But empty pipelines are not available, and state officials, after some reckoning on their calculators, found that 182 million railroad carloads of water or snow would be required to make up for California's water shortage alone. Estimated cost of such an operation: $437 billion.

Other well-meaning if farfetched schemes have been suggested as instant solutions to the Great Western Drought. California's Governor Jerry Brown received one proposal from a correspondent urging a statewide "psychic day," during which California's entire populace would join in a spiritual summons for rain. Another suggested a state give-away of disposable diapers, presumably to cut down on use of washing machines. Still another writer, offering to come to California and display his rainmaking skills, insisted: "The only thing I require is air fare and faith."

Many of the letters mixed facetiousness with common sense. One woman asked for a moratorium on watering cemeteries: "When the needs of the living are in danger, let the souls of the dead rest in peace a little dryer." Other writers suggested bans on selling and filling water beds, using Jacuzzi baths and sprinkling golfing greens and tennis courts. One advocated cutting back on water-guzzling yard plants like camellias and azaleas; cacti and other desert flora could be planted instead.

Some people were clearly thinking bigger. House Republican Leader John Rhodes of Arizona revived a ten-year-old proposal to divert some of Alaska's Yukon River before it spills into the Bering Sea. The waters would be channeled instead to the Lower 48. The cost of such a big ditch would be at least $200 billion, but some of that cost could perhaps be recovered by the generation of hydroelectric power as the water descended through the Canadian Rockies.

Perhaps the most intriguing scheme came from an imaginative scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. After an earlier drought in the 1950s, John Isaacs proposed towing giant, flat-topped icebergs from Antarctica (those from the Arctic would not be big enough) to the California coast; as they melted, fresh water could be siphoned out of the lakes that would form on top of them. The idea has impressed at least one country: petroleum-rich, water-poor Saudi Arabia. A French engineering firm hired by the Saudis is studying whether or not the plan is practical. Towed by six tugs, the French believe, an iceberg could make the 5,000-mile journey from the bottom of the world to the Red Sea port of Jidda in six months to a year. If the mountain of ice was large enough--say 85 million tons--and wrapped in insulating plastic, it would shrink by no more than 20% along the way, providing enough water to the desert kingdom to make the venture economically feasible.

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