Western Illinois University Professor: Mississippi River Diversion Schemes Are Impractical 

The drought that has gripped the entire northern hemisphere this year has drastically affected river commerce on all the hemisphere’s major shipping arteries, including China’s Yangtze River and Europe’s Rhine River—and now the Mississippi River as well. Scientific publications are saying that the western United States has been in the grip of a decades-long “megadrought.” 

We noted that some publications in Western states are reviving old dreams of piping Mississippi River water westward to relieve water shortages in the Colorado River and other western rivers and/or reservoirs (WJ, July 22).

Prof. Roger Viadero, a board-certified environmental engineer, professor and director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at Western Illinois University, wrote (with the help of two graduate students) an article on the history of those proposals, titled “Meeting the Need for Water in the Lower Colorado River by Diverting Water from the Mississippi River – A Practical Assessment of a Popular Proposal.” Viadero has served as the president of the Aquacultural Engineering Society and continues to serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Aquacultural Engineering. 

As Viadero explains in the introduction, “The decades-long drought that has impacted the southwestern U.S. has renewed interest in plans to divert a portion of the Mississippi River to help meet the need for water in the Colorado River Basin. After seeing this suggestion in editorials and news articles in local, regional and national venues, we noticed a lack of information that can be used by the public to weigh the practical aspects of these proposals. This has created a void that’s being filled by proposals that lack realistic goals, violate a number of physical laws and convey a poor understanding of scale, among other issues.”

Viadero notes that the latest wave of interest in sending Mississippi River water out west was sparked by a proposal in the Arizona Legislature in 2021. It was given new traction by a June 26 editorial in the Palm Springs (Calif.) Desert Sun by Don Siefkes of San Leandro, Calif., that went viral. Siefkes proposed using Mississippi River water to refill Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Viadero’s study responds directly to the proposal of building a pipeline from the Old River Control Structure to those two lakes.  

Viadero notes that the Colorado River Compact that regulates and distributes Colorado River water among the seven states through which it passes grossly overestimated the amount of water available even back then.  “The difference between the amount of [Colorado River] water promised and the amount of water that’s actually available remains at the heart of almost all water issues across the Colorado River Basin. When combined with the impacts of climate change, this disparity will only become greater over time.”

According to Viadero, Siefkes makes the same mistake in assessing how much Mississippi River water is available by a selective reading from a single streamgage located just above the Old River Control Structure. “[Siefkes claims that] about 4.5 million gallons a second flow past that structure on the Mississippi.” But in reality, “low, average and high-water discharge data for the Mississippi River from 2002 to 2022 … [at that gage show that] the discharge of 4.5 million gallons overstates the 20-year average by 38 percent.” At average discharge rates, the proposed diversion would amount to 17 percent of total flow. 

Other points Viadero makes:

• Elevation is the “elephant in the room.” There is no existing pump that could move the amounts of water required over the Continental Divide. “New pumps and infrastructure would be required.”

• The Mississippi River contains many species native to it, but that would be considered invasive in the Colorado River or Lake Mead.

• Mississippi River water contains large quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus from farm runoff. 

Viadero concludes, “Unfortunately, time, space, ecology, finances and politics aren’t on the side of this [Mississippi River] proposal.”

Interested readers can find Viadero’s paper at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364353761.