[vtsnowedin]

At present they are required to release nine million acre feet each year. I don't know if the treaties and contracts specify which month they release it but I expect it needs to go out when the down stream recipients need it.
So far this water year 2.7 million acre feet have flown in and they have released 2.6 million acre feet. The water year is 38% over and those numbers are about normal for the day of the year before snow melt begins to flow in much.
http://lakemead.water-data.com/

[vtsnowedin]

Off the top of your head do you know how many gallons of water are contained in an acre foot?
I have to do the math from my surveyor days many moon ago.
An acre is ten square chains and a surveyors chain is 66.0 feet long.
so 66 X 66 X 10 = 43,560 square feet
and a cubic foot of water contains 7.5 gallons so
43,560 X 7.5=326,700 gallons = one acre foot of water.

[Newfie]

No, but one hectare is just about 2.5 acres.
Guess who was looking at land overseas.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'N')o, but one hectare is just about 2.5 acres.
Guess who was looking at land overseas.

[Newfie]

LOL!!

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'L')OL!!

[Newfie]

Frankly NO.

Panama and Portugal looked the best from just a very cursory review. Neither one of us willing to look anywhere that has even a remote water problem. Our hunting cabin has no well.

It seems housing prices are insane everywhere.

We are extremely fortunate folks. We just sold our Philly row house where we lived for about 30 years.

We have a little over an acre on the dark side of a PA mountain with a tiny hunting cabin. Our legal residence and where we are at the moment. Spent 2 hours digging out the drive this am. Clay over rock, zero perk. 55 years ago Dad installed the “septic system”, some fill pushed over a drum he shot full of holes. We use bottled water and installed a incinerating toilet.

We have our cabin in Newfoundland which is a proper little house, BIG surface well, but we don’t look forward to the long DARK winters, having been spoiled by the Caribbean.

And we have 168 acres of wood lot in Cape Breton, beautiful, its own stream with year round springs but we don’t want to live there.

And we have the boat, which now is our primary home.

So I am spoiled rotten and picky. We have the time and ability to wait out the housing bubble, so thats our plan. But also, this is all low value stuff, total purchase price of the whole mess is under $200,000. With improvements we have maybe $300,000 invested.

I did take a quick look at houses in Nova Scotia, they were as bad as the USA.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'S')pent 2 hours digging out the drive this am.

[theluckycountry]

All the dams here in the SE of my state are full and most overflowing, we've had a month of rain in less than a week. Interestingly the CSIRO put out a paper a few months back showing how Australia is drying out but up here we seem to have skirted the dramas facing other parts. There are always regions where water is abundant, I think in terms of relocation this would be a prime factor in the future.

https://www.seqwater.com.au/dam-levels

[Newfie]

You mean that the new location needs abundant water supplies?

100% agree.

When I bought my acerage I looked for water. I have a small year round stream and a couple of year round springs. Our cabin in Canada has a dug well, about 6’ across and over 2’ of depth. Thats over 400 gallons in the pool.

When Covid was coming I looked for a place to weather the storm and settled on the island of Dominca. They are self sufficient in food and have copious amounts of water. The town has water spigots here and there, on stanchions in the sidewalk, for free public use. They even have a mooring ball with a garden hose for boats to fill their tanks.

[vtsnowedin]

I have not had a bad water year sense 1965 or so here in central Vt. I could have one next year of course, New England weather being as contrary as a raped chicken.

[evilgenius]

A couple of days ago, I saw an article that said that Lake Powell is about two feet from falling below where it can make power. When that happened before other reservoirs were released to help it. I don't know if that will happen this time. It had a huge impact upon those upstream reservoirs. Everything upstream is in drought.

When I suggest a means to get water from one side of the country to the other, a very costly thing, it isn't just about taking water from the east and enriching the west. It is about making something that can transport water from wherever it is plentiful, to wherever it isn't. That includes from places where it may now have always been historically plentiful, but will not be in the future. It is about building a coping mechanism. It is about using the fact that there is a large enough area in the country that you can assume that one part will always be doing better when climate change really gets bad. It is about humanity overcoming and succeeding. Too many people want to give up. It is too many people's default setting.

[vtsnowedin]

The reservoirs above Lake Powell are 62% full and the snowpack is 90% of average. One more good storm could get it to average or above.

[Newfie]

EU,

When we have excess traffic we build more roads to cope with the traffic. But that causes more development, which causes more traffic. So in effect you are not building roads to cope with traffic but to encourage development.

Same with the damns.

Coping would mean learning how to live within your means.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'E')U,

When we have excess traffic we build more roads to cope with the traffic. But that causes more development, which causes more traffic. So in effect you are not building roads to cope with traffic but to encourage development.

Same with the damns.

Coping would mean learning how to live within your means.

[Newfie]

Being an old rail transit builder and watching the machinations behind the scenes I can assure you it is an accurate description.

Real estate developers fight tooth and nail over the particular route and stops. The money is made when move the route to your neighborhood.

VT there are times when you and I disagree because we have different experiences. I suspect that is what is going on here. I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that your experience is in rural or suburban areas whereas mine is in major urban areas, think Washington DC. From where I sit at this moment this trend is obvious. Middeltown, DE sits on the east side of the C&D canal, a major shipping corridor that requires bridges with over 150’ clearance. There were 2 older bridges with surface roads. This area had remained undeveloped until recently when a new 4 lane highway and bridge improved access to the area.

Now in the past couple of years the area has simply exploded with “development.” It is simply amazing. Today I took a different route and came across a massive 55+ housing community. I saw multiple new developments in construction and signs for several more. Then there are the “distribution centers”, huge affairs right off the exit ramps. None of this would be possible if the highways were not built.

Same thing in DC. Ed built an extension into corn fields, before we were done there were huge apartment/condominium complexes and new shopping centers. I call them “mushroom cities”, the mushroom out of nothing when a station is added.

No doubt hou may see something different.

[theluckycountry]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vtsnowedin', 'P')eople don't take a new road to find out what is on the other end, they already know. The road serves the demand that is already there . It does not create that demand.

[vtsnowedin]

A couple of my experiences illustrate my point.
I started working for the NH.DOT back in 1975.They were widening I-95 from two to four lanes each way to deal with the traffic flow growth from it's 1960s first construction. The next summer I worked on a bridge over the Connecticut river joining NH and VT that had been built in 1928 after the flood of 27 and being owned by the two towns had been neglected almost to the point of failure. While we had it closed to car traffic as the deck was missing we detoured traffic south to the next bridge which was I-89. The boss sent me down to count cars with a clicker board to see how the exit ramps which to that point had no traffic lights just stop signs, were dealing with the extra cars per day. The interchange (Exit20,) was/is a narrow diamond type that served some corn fields and a gravel pit when it had been built. But when Vermont enacted a sales tax and NH did not it became the place for cheaper shopping and malls and fast food stores began to spring up on either side and was fast becoming what we call generica.
I sat there for four hours making a click for each left turn or right , and thru traffic south or north and recorded the numbers every fifteen minutes. etc. When the numbers reached the traffic bureau they were disbelieved and counter hoses were deployed which showed if anything I was missing some thrus while sorting out lefts and rights. The next thing I know we are getting a subcontractor to install a set of temporary traffic lights on span wire to control the traffic.( 40,000vpd).
That winter we started work on replacing a two lane thru girder bridge also 1920s vintage at the north end of the strip but within sight of the exit. The new bridge was four lanes wide and the plan was to build four lanes with all new drainage the length of the strip. My traffic counts had the city agitated and we got word to scrap the grass strips between curb and sidewalk and squeeze in a fifth suicide center lane. Plus the city added new sewer lines and a force main down the West side of the road. This involved massive field changes like moving the concrete carrying drainage pipe from west side to east side to not conflict with the sewer force main which meant that every grade of every drainage structure had to be recomputed in the field and almost every structure was located close to a brand new power pole as the power company had already installed new upgraded lines on the East side. This meant we had to have one of their line trucks come latch onto the pole and hold it while we dug our hole and installed catch basin and pipes and often again for two or three days to connect up cross pipes and those from side streets. We also added permanent lights to replace the temporary ones , the first of three sets over the years.
I again worked on this road about eight years ago when they replace the I-89 over pass bridges with wider ones to allow six lanes under the bridges to store more vehicles between the lights plus two new bridges to let a back road serve as an overflow between two mall parking lots during holiday traffic jams.
So here the tax law created the demand and the DOT has been playing catch up ever sense.
One of my last jobs was down at Exit 18 where the city was up sizing it's sewer mains in the area of the Dartmouth hospital. projects were having their permits held until the pipes could be up sized to handle the increased flow. The project involved driving a four foot diameter steel casing under four lanes of I-89 plus off and on ramps. That did not go well as the road had been built through a swamp and they had displaced the muck with blasted granite boulders from a nearby ledge cut.
But now that it is done three new hotels have been built plus a new bus terminal along with some factory expansions.
So in every case the demand was there the new road or infrastructure just served the demand. Not building it can keep growth from happening as in the hotels or perhaps the area near that canal you site but the demand comes first not after or because the road was built.

[Newfie]

VT,

I don’t mean to make my point to the exclusion of yours. Both can be true and intermingle. And as we both noted in our examples local situations effect what occurs.

Below are two accurate road map images I thought you might enjoy. I liked your phrase “suicide 5th lane” but don’t quite get what you mean. It did make me think of one of the images below. The other is an interchange in a cornfield.

URL=https://imgbox.com/xsYrcrba][/URL]

[vtsnowedin]

That first one is pretty interesting as it avoids a lot of stopped traffic and converts it to just yields merging with traffic going their way. I would assume the Xs where the lanes cross over are done with some overpass bridges to avoid yielding at the X point.
The E20 interchange has the preexisting road that crossed at right angles to I-89 and could not be economically moved so not like your cornfield example.
A suicide lane at least in my area is a central lane usually with two lanes each way beside it that is cross hatched or marked with turn arrows at intersections. Cars seeking to turn left into a business driveway pull over into this crosshatched lane and stop waiting for a break in the opposing traffic while letting the traffic that were behind them proceed without waiting for them to get out of their way. It is dubbed suicide because cars from both directions can and do use it so you sometimes come head to head, each trying to get a bit further ahead to line up with their desired driveway.