Monday, April 19, 2021

The Desertification of much of the South Western United States

If you look at the drought map in the previous article it starts as far north as the bottom tips of Idaho and Wyoming but continues down through almost all of Utah and 1/2 of Colorado and All of Arizona. However, there is more to this than you first see because the PRIMARY water source of San Diego and the whole Los Angeles area is also the Colorado River. It's true that the Canals were dug from northern California rivers to also go to Los Angeles but it's primary water source was always the Colorado River since the very early 1900s. IN fact, The Salton Sea is an engineering mistake from trying to get the Colorado River to flow in a canal to Los Angeles to begin with. So, if you get a chance look at a map on one of the biggest engineering disasters of the last century which is the Salton Sea itself which is now still a recreational lake with so much salt in it that you float there with most of your body above the water because of the extreme salt of the lake. However, most people don't do this anymore like they used to when I was a boy in the 1950s swimming there.

So, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles as well as most of Utah won't have enough water soon unless Los Angeles desalinates the ocean for water like they sometimes do in Santa Barbara when the droughts get bad.

So, Southern California, All of Arizona, most of Utah, parts of Colorado and the Las Vegas area are a water disaster in the making and we don't know when many of these areas might completely run out of water and have to have water trucked in at some point to keep going from other areas where there is still water like the ocean or something. 

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