No Stupid Questions

On top of the logistics of moving massive amounts of water around, flood water is typically highly contaminated - by their nature, floods sweep up everything in their path, which typically will include things like:

• Soil and sand (a massive pain to filter out)
• Agricultural run off (manure, pesticides, fertilizer, ...)
• Raw sewage (from treatment plants that tend to be near waterways, or just from damaged infrastructure)
• Industrial wastes (from existing plants, or old contaminated sites)

Infectious disease is a major problem after a flood, partly because of infrastructure damage but also just because so many people will have come in contact with contaminated water - you don't want to irrigate your crops with flood water, much less drink it

In California we have a project called Flood-MAR, which stands for Managed Aquifer Recharge. Farmers who have land that wont be damaged by floods volunteer to pump lots of water onto their lands during floods. This reduces the downstream flooding slightly, and the water soaks deep into the ground for safe keeping until it needs to be pumped up during a drought.

Seems like it would be a nightmare to purify. Perhaps useful for agricultural applications, but for drinking and household use…. Most water supplies don’t have e.g., human bodies floating in them.

Not a scientist, happy to be proven wrong here, but that’s my gut.

How would you move all that water? A fleet of water trucks carrying thousands of gallons (barely a dent)? A series of pipes across hundreds/thousands of miles? Who’s going to pay for it? And then you get into the problem of not actually knowing when/where a flood is going to hit. Yes, there’s flood zones, but a pipe route is going to be very specific, I doubt you could just pick it up and move it wherever. Maybe something would be done for a long-term problem to alleviate an already permanently flooded area, but it seems like such a massively expensive undertaking, I’m not sure anyone would be willing to do it.

Flood water is a terrible material.

It is full of sand, dirt, plants, animals (dead and alive), chemicals, germs of all kinds, body parts, dangerous pieces of junk...

Definitely not worth the effort. You want nothing else but to get away from it.

Moving? No. But apparently an early benefit of dams was to provide water throughout the year. Might see more of that.

Moving water is tricky. If you're lucky you can move it downhill, but I expect the situations where you can do that from flood to drought is not common. Moving uphill is pretty much out because it'll take too much energy.

Some cities catch flood water, hold it, and release it to reservoirs, rivers, etc. later. Chicago's is interesting and Dallas has a GIANT water vault under Central Expressway. I think most of our water comes from dead (animal) soup.

Please send your empty bottles to flooded areas.

Thank you for your contribution.

If the price is right water can be delivered anywhere. Conveniently, places that suffer from droughts also sometimes suffer from floods, so it can just be saved for later rather than delivered anywhere.

Build an aqueduct!

Perfect idea. Let's drop a huge pipeline from the Mississippi all the way through to California. The energy to build the pipeline, and run the pumping stations will certainly not add to the already problematic energy causing climate change causing these droughts that we're "fixing" with this huge pipeline.

/s

You need to chat with Adrian Wapcaplett, he's a partner at a marketing firm that can sell just about anything.

https://youtu.be/7qNj-QFZbew?si=C6YHy3bZ3oosszRi