Letters to the Editor: Fill Lake Mead with water from this defective reservoir

To the editor: With the western U.S. becoming increasingly drier and hotter, and with snow levels in the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada decreasing, measures need to be taken to use and store water more efficiently. As pointed out in your article, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both large reservoirs on the Colorado River, are each presently one-third full.

The Lake Powell reservoir is akin to a leaky faucet. It loses about 860,000 acre feet of water annually to evaporation because of its high desert location, and to seepage into its porous sandstone banks.

If Lake Powell were drained and its water incorporated into Lake Mead, we could once again see the Glen Canyon that had been mostly flooded. It was described as one of the world's natural treasures, a wonderland of gorges, spires, cliffs and grottoes.

Ironically, John Wesley Powell, for whom Lake Powell is named, saw during his Colorado River expedition in 1869 "a land of beauty and glory" at Glen Canyon.

Tony Baker, Rancho Palos Verdes

..

To the editor: As I read of drought in the West, I see news clips of flooding in the Midwest and South.

Since President Biden was so anxious to shut down the Keystone pipeline, which would have transported oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, maybe he could consider building a pipeline from the Midwest to California to replenish our reservoirs with water that otherwise dumps into the Gulf of Mexico. He could restore the Keystone jobs that he killed.

William Mulholland did something similar for Los Angeles by building a 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens Valley. In 1913, when that project was finished, they didn't have the equipment we have today.

This would certainly be an infrastructure project of major proportions, worthy of the investment, as the West regularly sees near-empty reservoirs while areas in the Midwest and the South flood.

Mark Collins, Altadena

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.