Interesting. Google here I come. Well I looked it up and found accusations but nothing substantiated expect for way back in the 1400s. A little well poisoning here and there but nothing by a modern day country’s military.
Spoiling wells (often with corpses) has always been common place since at least Assyrian times and up to modern times. Modern military examples abound on the western front of WWI and the Eastern Front and Pacific theater of WWII. Here's a little Smithsonian piece on it:
History on Fire: EPISODE 85: The Siege That Changed All of History on Apple Podcasts @g8rjd sent me this link earlier this year to listen to and it talks about the poisoning of wells before a battle.
I like Bolelli alright. Much prefer Mike Duncan's Revolutions (dry, but funny) and of course, Dan Carlin's (near perfection of story telling) HH stuff.
Apparently some people are wondering why California doesn't just have the Mississippi River pumped (or trucked!) to their doorstep. One of them is especially qualified because he's Dutch, and they know how to manage their water (although, to be accurate, the Dutch are known for being able to keep water OUT of an area). The answer to the difficulties of piping water OVER the Rocky Mountains is simply to dig a tunnel UNDER the Rocky Mountains. The drought-parched West wants to take Mississippi River water? Fat chance! Or is it? How many quadrillion dollars would this tunnel under the Rocky Mountains cost? And at what percentage complete would the U.S. be bankrupt?
I read about this. They said a canal from the Mississippi would refill Lake Mead reservoir in less than a year and Lake Powell in just over a year. The big issue I have with that (aside from the trillions of dollars to build it) is that it wouldn't help those in California "learn any lessons". They would just use more water and pretend like there isn't any water problems anymore.
As an engineer, I would be very impressed to see water flow uphill 1500 miles through a canal. The surface elevation of Lake Mead is 1229 ft. The elevation of the lower parts of the Mississippi is less than 250 ft (233 ft at Memphis). And that does not even count the little obstacle called the Rocky Mountains. If they build a canal between the two bodies of water (assuming they drill a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains), the only thing that will happen is that the rest of Lake Mead will empty out into the Mississippi. Another genius weighs in with a suggestion to use a large aqueduct to transfer water from the Mississippi at 250,000 gal/sec. We could fill Lake Powell in less than a year with an aqueduct from Mississippi River Ignoring the elevation change and pump size limitations, how big would a pipe be to transfer that much water at typical maximum liquid speeds (10 ft/sec) from a pump? I calculate 66 ft in diameter. Of course, an aqueduct moves much slower than that, on the order of 0.5 ft/sec. I calculate the diameter of the aqueduct to be 292 ft. The biggest U.S. water supply pipes that I am aware of are the two 40'-tall underground aqueducts supplying New York City with drinking water from the Hudson Valley. A typical aqueduct has an elevation change of 1:4800, or about one foot per mile. If it is 1500 miles from Memphis to Lake Mead, it needs to be another 1500' high, in addition to the height difference of the two bodies of water (1229 - 233 = 996 ft). So the first part of the aqueduct has to be about 2500 ft high, or almost the size of the Burj Kalifa in Dubai (the tallest building in the world). You have to support a 292'-diameter pipe full of water about a half mile in the air, use hundreds of pumps that put out 1200 psig to get the water up that high, and you would still have to drill a 300' hole through the Rocky Mountains for a couple hundred miles. What could go wrong? Sadly, this genius decided not to select Lake Mead as the final destination, but Lake Powell, which has a surface elevation of 3700 ft., which means the Memphis end of the aqueduct would be over a mile high, and the pump pressure over 2000 psig. I'm sure it all looks great if you use a flat map and let the east end of the map rest on a coaster...
Getting water from the Mississippi to the Colorado River is practically impossible, but the upper parts of the Missouri River could be sent over or under the continental divide into the Colorado watershed. The question would be if there is enough water at that location to make a difference.
wait...what if we used Lake Mead as a giant battery. use solar to move it uphill, let it settle and nutrients get absorbed, and then let it flow back the Mississippi with California and west coast get to keep the first fill plus 5 - 10% annually for being the battery. Set up solar stations and pumps along the route of the tunnel/pipe that can run the pumps at 100% during the day and spin backwards to put power into the grid at night. Create special nanomaterial liners for the pipe to minimize headloss in the system.
That sounds like an interesting idea, but in addition to the capital costs involved, there are always losses in converting energy back and forth between different types of energy. You would have electrical transmission losses, motor and pump inefficiencies, friction in the pipe, turbine inefficiencies, etc. (The solar system would lose 10-15% converting DC to AC power, plus 2-5% in the transmission of the electricity. Water turbines are on the order of 90% efficient. Pump motors are typically 90-95% efficient, but high-pressure pumps may generate more heat and be less efficient.) I am not aware of pumps that can have the impeller spun backwards to generate electricity--it typically does not work that way (for gas compression, you can put a generator on a steam turbine and recover excess energy, but nothing ever flows backwards). For smaller pumps, you don't want the water to flow backwards because the impeller could spin off the pump shaft. You would also have to have reservoirs along the way, as you typically don't want one pump directly feeding another one, both for process control reasons and operability of the pumps. The reservoirs would lose some of the water to evaporation. Then you would have to realize that Mississippi River water has a dirty secret: it's full of silt. You would have to shut down the system periodically to clean it out (including the reservoirs!).
You would have to have a series of locks to raise the water up as you gain over a thousand feet. I suppose you could use the wind turbines to power the pumps but that's a lot of maintenance. You would also have to tunnel through mountains which has it's own issues.
The Missouri River in eastern Montana is about 4,000 ft above sea level, and the elevation of South Pass in Wyoming is 7400 ft, so that reduces the elevation difference to 3400 ft, which is much better than a southern route from the Mississippi to Lake Mead, but it's still significant. The distance is 1200 miles. But I think you are right, you could not take enough water out to make a difference in the southwest without ruining the entire river. Eastern Montana does not get large amounts of rainfall like western Washington state or the Gulf Coast--it's more snowmelt, I suspect. Also, one of the historic nicknames of the Missouri River is "The Big Muddy", which does not bode well for re-locating it by pipeline.
I'm still not sure why they keep talking about the Mississippi River, the Missouri river is so much closer.
