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Remember the NAWAPA? Didn't think so.
In the early 1960s, an engineer and businessman named Ralph Parsons came up with an audacious plan [buzzfeed.com] to manage North America's fresh water supply with a system of dams and canals that would stretch from the Yukon River to the Great Lakes to northern Mexico. Parsons was unsuccessfully pushing the project until his death in 1974.
The solution Parsons devised, a continental-scale plumbing project called the North American Water and Power Alliance, or NAWAPA, was never built, but it’s never quite gone away, either. Today it persists as a fantastical vision that could have been, and might in some form still be.
“For those of us who work in the water world, NAWAPA is a constant presence,” says Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute. “It’s the most grandiose water-engineering project ever conceived for North America. It’s both a monument to the ingenuity of America and a monument to the folly of the 20th century. In a sense, we measure all other ideas against it.”
As journalist Marc Reisner observed in his book Cadillac Desert, the project had only two major drawbacks: It would destroy anything still resembling nature in western North America. And it might require taking Canada by force.
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NAWAPA would require the construction of 369 individual dams, canals, pipelines, tunnels, and pumping stations. Its builders would have to move 32 billion cubic yards of earth and 30 million tons of steel. Its largest proposed dam would be 1,700 feet tall, more than twice the height of Hoover Dam (and far taller than any dam in the world today). Parsons and his staff estimated that the project would cost between $100 and $200 billion over 30 years — or, in today’s dollars, somewhere around $760 billion and $1.5 trillion.
