WaterWired

President Trump Announces TRUMP - Tapping Recharge Under Mexico Plan - Will Build Border Wall, Harvest Groundwater, Earn Money, and Provide Jobs

Last year, President Donald J. Trump announced CRAP - the Canadian Resources Acquisition Project - designed to obtain water from Canada. Today, he turned his focus to the southern anchor of NAFTA, Mexico, in an effort to solve a multi-faceted problem: water, money, jobs, and immigration.  

In a series of Tweets on 1 April 2018 from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald J. Trump announced a bold new plan to augment western water supplies, build a border wall, earn money, and provide jobs that WOULD NOT COST AMERICAN TAXPAYERS A SINGLE PESO!

Later, in a press conference at which the press, save for Fox News, was conspicuously absent, the President, with a somnambulant Vice President Mike Pence fawning behind him, Gen. Alberto 'Al' Muerzo, Jr., of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and expat Okie energy tycoon and serial husband T. Bone Lickens at his side, the President described how he developed his plan.

"I was watching Fox and Friends - boy, those folks are smart, just like Hannity, and the girls are
MUCH HOTTER than FAILING Megyn Kelly - the other morning and they had someone on talking about all the water beneath Mexico and how it had been PUMPED FROM THE USA!!! DISGRACEFUL!!! Just more fake news from CNN or the failing New York Times? Sad. Was going to call President Piñata but figured WHY LET ON WHAT I KNEW!!! ALMOST FORGOT my deal-making skills!"

"So I called up Ryan Stinke - my pet name for him - he really does stink a lot - but he was out traveling so I called the Corps of Engineers - I know them from all their Florida water projects. Amazing folks, and they have GENERALS! Then I phoned my good friend T. Bone Lickens - he's an OIL and WATER GUY and a SMART DUDE - and said I needed his help." 

At this point Lickens opined that he had never met a visionary like Trump, who understands money ‘even better than my last ex-wife'. He stated that he really liked TRUMP!"

Spokesperson Sarah Huckster-Sanders then introduced the head of the Mexican engineering firm ABRIL-TONTO, Dr. Alberto ‘Al’ Muerzo, Sr., erstwhile dean of the Universidad de Perro Negro’s School of Engineering and Culinary Science. Dr. Muerzo is the designer of the original 'Trump Wall' and father of Gen. Alberto 'Al' Muerzo, Jr. 

Trump gloated as he said,

"I got TWO Muerzos for the price of ONE!" Can I DEAL or WHAT? TREMENDOUS! I got TWO FREE LUNCHES!" 

The senior Señor Muerzo then explained in perfect English:

"This plan will succeed. We will build a 2000-mile long wall using steel panels that will extend 50 feet above and 100 feet below the land surface, penetrating the water table. The panels will be hollow and perforated below ground. Pumps will extract the groundwater which will be routed into a pipeline. We will then sell the water back to Mexico, use it to fill Lakes Mead and Powell, or sell it directly to Arizona, Nevada, California or Texas. We estimate we can pump 5000 acre-feet per mile for 2000 miles and sell it for $1000 per acre-foot. That is $10B per year. We will pay for the project in a few years." 

The President could hardly restrain himself:

"This project WILL PAY FOR ITSELF! It will put THOUSANDS TO WORK on BOTH SIDES OF THE BORDER! The workers will be the Mexican rapists, drug addicts, DACA recipients and criminals who will be put to work in their own country and won't come to the USA. Unemployed US steelworkers will be needed for the panel fabrication. WIN-WIN!!!"

"And what's this about the GULF OF MEXICO?!!? It should be the AMERICAN SEA!!! We'll redo NAFTA!!!!" 

The Fox News reporter then asked if there were there any potential stumbling blocks.

Gen. Muerzo replied,

"Yes. The Mexicans spell 'groundwater' as two words, not one: agua subterránea. We think that can be negotiated, or, if not, we can cancel NAFTA."

One more question from the reporter, this directed to Dr. Muerzo:

"Since you are doing this for the USA aren't you working against the interests of your own country? What are you receiving that is so valuable?"

"Green card."

      Happy April Fools' Day!   ¡Feliz el día de tontos de abril!

[Disclosure notice: this is fake news, but perhaps it's allegorical. Any resemblance between real people and characters in this post is an unintended consequence.] 

Update - Conference Abstracts & Participation: 'Connecting the Dots: The Emerging Science of Aquatic System Connectivity'

This is a second call for abstracts for the American Water Resources Association’s innovative 2017 Spring Specialty Conference, Connecting the Dots:  The Emerging Science of Aquatic System Connectivity. The conference will be held from 30 April through 3 May 2017, at the fabulous Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort in Snowbird, UT, just about 30 minutes from the Salt Lake City International Airport.  

The deadline for submitting an abstract is 9 January 2017.

Technical Chair Scott G. Leibowitz and his planning committee have done an exceptional job assembling the meeting and developing its content, which focuses on hydrological, chemical, and biological connectivity in lakes, wetlands, streams, estuaries, aquifers, and oceans. 

Plenary speakers will include:

·         Charles Hawkins, Utah State University, College of Natural Resources – Connectivity and habitat suitability jointly influence the ecological intactness of aquatic ecosystems

·         Jeffrey McDonnell, University of Saskatchewan, School of Environment and Sustainability – Hydrologic connectivity: From hillslopes to watersheds

·         Catherine Pringle, University of Georgia, Odum School of Ecology  – Hydrologic connectivity and ecological interactions in aquatic ecosystems

The conference will cover a wide range of topics on connectivity and should be a wonderful opportunity to learn about and discuss research that others are doing in fields related to aquatic systems.  Session topics include, but are not limited to:

S1 - Biological connectivity within and among wetlands

S2 - Chemical connectivity in wetlands, lakes and watersheds

S3 - Connectivity between estuaries and terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems

S4 - Considering connectivity in aquatic resource management and protection

S5 - Connectivity in cold regions

S6—Geographically isolated wetland connectivity: Recent research advances

S7 - Hydrologic connectivity and ecosystem services across a range of system

 S8 - Hydrologic connectivity within river corridors and beyond

·S9—Lake connectivity: Exploring hydrologic connectivity and its effects on lake physical, chemical and biological composition

S10—Navigating the Clean Water Act:  The role of connectivity in policymaking

S11—Stream networks:  Climate and biological connectivity in four dimensions

 S12—Successes in integrating models and measurements into management  for aquatic connectivity
           
S13—Tackling connectivity through cross-scale integration: Lessons learned in the Prairie Pothole Region

S14—Using GIS and remote sensing approaches to inform ASC

Your contribution does not have to fit within the 14 sessions above. If you think it does, use the session code when you submit your abstract. But the conference scope is broader than what is indicated above  and can accommodate a a variety of ASC topics - click here and scroll down to see the entire list.

We encourage you to submit an abstract and attend this exciting conference at the beautiful Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort.  Further information on the conference and instructions for submitting an abstract are available here.  

 Snowbird is an excellent place to connect the dots. Join us for an informative meeting in a region of great natural beauty and among those doing cutting-edge work in this field. 

"I'm dead, but if I were not, I'd attend this meeting and seek to evolve from my present state to a more informed one." - C. Darwin 

Oh! Canada! Donald Trump Proposes Nuclear-Bomb Fueled Canadian Resources Acquisition Project (CRAP)

BEAVER BREATH, ALBERTA (UPI): At a news conference earlier today, master builder, self-styled smart guy and serial trophy-wife collector  Donald J. Trump announced a grand scheme to ‘water the Western USA’ with CRAP, the Canadian Resources Acquisition Project.

Trump provoked additional controversy by proposing to use thermonuclear bombs to enhance the construction process and speed up his plans to 'make America wet again and provide nuclear weapons to Canada so they can defend themselves.'

Trump, himself with Canadian roots like fellow presidential wannabe Ted 'Eh?' Cruz, began his speech paying tribute to ‘his many, many good friends in the Great White North’ and lauded the ‘many terrific things they have exported to the USA’.

My God, what would we do without Canadians? They are a terrific bunch of people. Ask yourselves, ‘What a miserable place this world would be without them!' There would be no nice, polite people in the world. We would not know the joys of munching a Coffee Crisp or chewing on back bacon while quaffing a bottle of  Molson’s. Bob and Doug McKenzie, les hoseurs extraordinaires who embody the quintessential Canadian 'can-do' spirit, would be just a gleam in the eyes of someone like Larry David or Andrew Dice Clay. And what would the world be without Newfie jokes and Ice Road Truckers? Maude Barlow, you gotta love her! And don’t forget ice hockey and curling! The only times our dear friends have faltered were by exporting Justin Bieber, who should have remained ice-bound in Flin Flon, Manitoba, and allowing Les Québecois out of the asylum. Oh yeah, and Rush, eh?

 With that glowing introduction, Trump then dropped the big one:

But Canada has withheld her biggest gifts to the USA till now: her water, gas, and oil. I, along with some visionary Canadians, will resurrect the long-buried North American Water And Power Alliance (NAWAPA) that will bring water south from British Columbia and Alberta to water the Western USA via CWAP, the Canal for Water And Power, and a companion pipeline, POOP (Pipeline for Oil and Oil Products), will bring oil from Alberta and shale gas from BC. CWAP will also generate power through its unique embedded turbines.

The project will also bring back much-needed jobs to America and provide menial labor to the millions of terrific people in the lower stratum of American life. I love the little people.

Trump mentioned that the respected Fifty-Four Forty Foundation’s recent report, Frostback  Friends Forever: Canada, the USA’s Water and Energy Colony, had influenced him greatly, so much so that he established the Water Trust Foundation (WTF) to realize his dream of draining the Great White North. Bush FamilyDevelopment (BFD), now headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, is also involved. Cheney has long been a strong proponent of WTF, CRAP, and POOP.

 Trump then brought his partners to the stage: expat Okie energy tycoon and serial spouse T. Bone Lickens; water maven Pat Mulroy, formerly of the Southern Nevada Alliance for Resource Exploitation (SNARE); Sarah Palin, former short-term governor of a kleptocratic petro-state; erstwhile prime minister Stephen ‘Alberta Clipper’ Harper and former premier Van Coover (British Columbia); and ersatz songstress Celine Doyenne.

Lickens opined  that he had never met a visionary like Trump, who understands money ‘even better than my last ex-wife. And I really like CRAP.' Palin excitedly gushed. "If you stand on a really tall stepladder, you can almost see the province of Alberto from my front porch!"

When asked by Toronto Lobe and Male reporter Hugh Jeego why Trump had former politicians as partners, spokeswoman former congresswoman Michele Bachmann Turner-Overdrive barked: “He’s takin' care of business.” She then winked and added, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Trump then interrupted: "We have thousands of team members, the The Trumpies, who are fanning out in waves across two nations to promote CRAP. Each one has a beautiful little book bag designed by my beautiful wife, Melania, just chock full of literature."

Bachmann Turner-Overdrive, who prefers the nickname ‘BTO’ since it rhymes with ‘GTO’, which she noted was ‘one hot car,’ said former politicians Harper and Coover had extensive experience with the USA and were well-respected in their home provinces. She noted that Harper is especially beloved by his fellow Canadians. She also said that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had extensive dealings with Canada. At that point, Gov. Palin chirped, “If you stand on a really tall stepladder and move some mountains, you can almost see Colombia from my front porch!” 

When asked by Edmonton Urinal reporter Freda Press about the rumored inolvement of Mexico, Bachmann Turner-Overdrive noted that Trump had the political acumen to involve all three North American countries: Canada, the USA, and New Mexico. She added that in terms of international cooperation, this will truly be “the shot heard ‘round the world!” She then introduced the head of the Mexican engineering firm ABRIL-TONTO, Dr. Alberto ‘Al’ Muerzo, erstwhile dean of the Universidad de Perro Negro’s School of Engineering and Culinary Science. Dr. Muerzo is the designer of the proposed 'Trump Wall'.

The effervescent Gov. Palin interjected, "If you stand on a scaffolding and move some more mountains, you can see New Mexico from my front porch!"

Trump then introduced four of Canada’s most innovative and wealthiest  entrepreneurs, all financial backers and silent partners, and good friends: Jean-Paul Bouxboux, inventor of the smart hockey puck;  Pierre Bête-Noire, creator of the wildly successful ‘back bacon beer donut’ for the Tim Hortons chain; Jacques Double-Entendre, renowned French-Canadian annoyeur and former owner of the alleged pro football team Wiinipeg Blue Bombers; and maple-syrup magnate J. Sargent Preston, who brought his life partner King.

 When asked about the cost, Trump cited figures produced by his economics consultant, Dr. Anthony 'Tony Numbers' Pizzeria of the Meyer Lansky School of Business at UNLV: 'Fageddaboutit. It's gonna cost a lot of Bens." Trump said that estimate was good enough for him, because he was a 'smart guy'. In addition, the Canadian federal government has agreed to post the Maritme Provinces and Quebec as collateral, but was having trouble finding a bank to accept those terms unless Quebec was excluded. 

An exuberant Trump added, 'This deal is so good that even Margaret Atwood would support it!'

             Happy April Fools' Day!     ¡Feliz el día de tontos de abril!

[Disclosure notice: this is fictitious, but perhaps it's allegorical. Any resemblance between real people and characters in this post is an unintended consequence. See my previous April Fools' Day posts: 1 April 2007; 1 April 2008; 1 April 2009; April 2010.]

"You can take the boy out of the Catholic high school but you can't take the Catholic high school out of the man." -- my long-suffering spouse

Crap Detecting 101-3: Beam Me Up, Scotty! 'Shatner Trek' Coming Soon to Seattle... and British Columbia?

Much has been made of Canadian actor William Shatner's scheme to pipe freshwater from Seattle down to California for $30B.

I am no pipeline expert, but I doubt that $30B would get the pipeline paralleling Interstate 5  to the Oregon border (c. 165 miles from downtown Seattle), much less to California's Lake Shasta, perhaps another 450 miles. 

And where will the water come from to fill the pipeline, Bill? About half of Washington is now drought-stricken, although the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett area is not yet part of the drought-stricken region. But it could be by early May.

Since Shatner is a Canadian, perhaps he could cajole his countrymen to let us extend the pipeline into British Columbia. Now we're talking serious water, right? Long live NAWAPA! Maybe the LaRouche folks can help. 

Then again, Shatner is from Montreal, and that would likely not endear him to western Canadians.

And speaking of Canadians and NAWAPA, here is a piece by columnist Stephen Hume in The Vancouver Sun.

Methinks Capt. Kirk is seeking some PR with all this. 

Jack Ohman's cartoon from the Sacramento Bee says it all....

 Note: A colleague told me that the Sacramento Suburban Water District Asset Management plan estimates the cost of a new 78" main (the largest they price out) at $6.4 million per mile. My gut feeling tells me that is far too low for the 'Shatner Plan'.

 "If you make a fool of yourself, you can do it with dignity, without taking your pants down. And if you do take your pants down, you can still do it with dignity." - William Shatner 

Recycle Redux! Happy Earth/Triage Day: My First Earth Day, Godzilla's Revenge, Conspiracy Theory Alert!

So what better thing to do on Earth Day than to recycle? Well, here's my 2013 Earth Day post!

Enjoy!

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Today is an auspicious day: it is Earth Day, first celebrated in 1970. It is also the 19th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon's death. Recall that EPA was created on his watch. Somewhat ironic, no?

Unlike many things I did in college, I vividly recall what I did on that inaugural event: build a dam. 'What?", you say, "A dam?" Yes, a dam, at the College of William and Mary.

Read on:

Runoff (I knew some hydrologic terms even then) from a construction site was dumping (I knew environmental lingo even then - 'dumping', not 'transporting') sediment into our beloved Lake Matoaka, hallowed site of many ancient and sacred rituals (annual 3.2 beer can regatta, etc.). Thomas Jefferson, he who founded The University but attended W&M, reputedly lost his virginity there every week or so, an event that was celebrated nightly by many reverent, tradition-conscious undergraduates and wayward faculty. 

W&M didn't have an engineering program, so dam construction was left to geologists. What, we were going to ask the physics majors? We'd still be arguing about strength of materials, charge density, and moments.  

So build we did.

My sed-strat classmates (I had none who would admit to being  a geomorphologist) protested our plans because they wanted to witness an event that normally took millennia to complete: formation of a delta. But led by Dr. Gerry Johnson, we won the day, constructed the dam (a replica of which is shown here), and saved our beloved waterway from premature infilling. 

There was much celebrating that evening at the lake. And much contamination the next day. Something for Earth Day 1971 to address. 

So there!

Fast forward to 2013. My youthful enthusiasm and naïveté have waned, replaced by ennui and cynicism. Instead of Earth Day, I tend to lean toward the curmudgeonly view
recently espoused (tongue-in-cheek) by Joe Romm in his post, Let's Rename Earth Day, a reprise of a 2008 piece in Salon.

Here is how he concluded:

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

As a penultimate thought, I suspect that many environmentalists and climate science advocates will have their own, private name: “I told you so” Day. Not as a universal as “Triage Day,” I admit, but it has a Cassandra-like catchiness, no?

Finally, perhaps we should call it “science day.” We don’t have a day dedicated to celebrating science, and don’t we deserve one whole day free from the non-stop disinformation of the anti-science crowd?

As always, I’m open to better ideas….

Eaarth day?  

Finally, one of Earth's creatures is not taking our malignant neglect of his homeland lying down. Yes, Godzilla, himself a creation of our abuse of Earth, decided to take things into his own stubby claws and make things right: he destroyed the ASARCO stacks at its defunct El Paso copper smelter. Yes, tired of years of air pollution, on 13 April 2013 Tokyo's worst nightmare popped up in west Texas and vented his rage on the ASARCO chimneys that had belched noxious gases into the skies for over 100 years. 

Friend and colleague Ari Michelsen braved cohorts of Federal agents (who wanted us to believe that the stacks were brought down purposely), automatic weapons fire from Ciudad Juárez, and the great beast himself, to snap this picture. 

Thanks to his courage, the shroud of silence about this seminal event has been breached and the nefarious intent of the US goverment exposed! Conspiracy theorists (and I know you're out there), rejoice!

So Happy Earth/Triage Day!

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Enjoy, and celebrate Earth Day!

"A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." - Jerry Seinfeld The Week, 27 April 2012