As I write this week’s column on Sunday the daytime high in, say, Boston, is about 10 degrees. And many of the cities can’t find anywhere to dump all that snow. Why they weren’t dumping it in the ocean is beyond me. I see that a few cities are doing it now. There was some concern about hazardous materials being in the snow. Maybe some dog doodoo left over from before the snow started to fall, and kid’s yard toys.
Our daytime high Sunday was 78 degrees.
We need to trade the East Coast some warm weather in exchange for some of that snow.
Almost daily we read in the newspaper or see reports on TV about the proposal to haul crude oil to the Central Coast, or a pipeline to carry oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. The Keystone Pipeline proposal would be a 36-inch diameter pipe from Alberta, Canada, a little more than 2,100 miles to refineries in Illinois and Texas.
The worry is over spills of these allegedly “toxic” substances being moved around the nation. There’s even an argument that we don’t need the oil now.
But what about water? Water should be safe to transport anywhere. And we need that.
We could build a pipeline from somewhere in the New England states to the West. That could be Texas, Nevada or maybe all the way to California. In the meantime, let’s load up all that snow into railroad cars intended to haul coal and bring it west. Park the trains near lakes or rivers and let it melt, or dump it and head back to the east for more.
Expensive? Of course.
But as the man said, “Nobody knows the real price of water until there isn’t any.”
And if the pipe leaked, it is only water, so what real harm would there be?
The Romans were able to build aqueducts to transport water where it needed to be, and they did it without power tools and easy-to-apply pumped-in concrete.
We could even haul water in on those railroad tanker cars intended to haul yet-to-be-refined oil into the Central Coast. Who could object to that?
I ran this idea by my heart doctor last Friday. He nodded in agreement and said that my heart appeared to be in good working order.
Of course, good mental health isn’t his specialty.
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