Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all, but LA doesn't either?
My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.
Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
It’s too complicated to corruptly make money off of a large project like that. It’s much easier to just buy a bunch of drugs and needles and give it to the methheads, or spend money on homeless while building zero homes.
I was surprised to find out it was largely uncovered, though I guess it probably makes it much cheaper to construct. I usually think of aqueducts as pipes or tunnels, like Persian qanāts. I wonder how much water is lost due to evaporation.
Correct it's massively energy intensive to filter the salt out the newest best ideas still use ~2 KWh/m3 of water and that's a lab system in perdue that batches the process instead of having it run continuously which is why current RO desalination systems require so much energy.
For usage where the water mostly returns as sewage, is treated and then returned to the ocean, you can just dilute the brine with the treated discharge and then it returns at basically the original salinity.
Also I love when they refer to it as the "_First_ California Water Wars" in a grim realization of the future of water scarcity in the West
My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
Desalination is dominated by operating costs.
Most of the video content has the correct coloring, from my experience observing the aqueduct.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
(Chinatown)