(Roughly) Daily

The pillars of smoke from the Bel Air fire were visible around the city, and as the firefighters struggled through the canyons, most people could simply watch and worry. But Ralph Parsons, the wealthy founder of a wildly successful international engineering firm, was trying to end the Southern California drought — forever.

It was 1961.

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…

The North American Water and Power Alliance was an audacious proposal to divert water to parched western states that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars and pissed off Canada.  The abandoned plan that aimed to save America from drought: “Pipe Dreams.”

* “Noah Cross” (John Huston), Chinatown

###

As we contemplate the commons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1832 that an act of Congress created Hot Springs Reservation, protecting the site’s thermal waters to be “preserved for future recreation,” in Arkansas.  Established before the concept of a national park existed in the U.S., it was the first time that American land had been set aside by the federal government in this way, and so is considered by many to have been the first National Park.  It officially became a National Park in 1921.

Pool of hot spring water in Hot Springs National Park