A proposal to save billions of dollars.

In October 25, 2007 RMS (Risk Management Solutions) reported insurance claims in Oakland Hills fires alone, in 1991, totaled between $3 and $4 billion in today’s dollar values. That’s not millions but BILLIONS.

According to Arnold Schwarzenegger, California has been burning ever since. Not just in late summer, but the whole year round. Over the years, damages must have grown to many tens of billions of dollars––and continue to grow.

In the meantime, water in Californian reservoirs is shrinking at an alarming rate. Could it be, at least in part, lack of sufficient water to put out those countless wildfires?


A few months earlier, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver has said he anticipated $2 billion in federal aid. Ultimately, the cost of the disaster may rival that of 1993 Midwest floods that caused more than $20 billion in damage and 48 deaths.

Year after year, after years… whatever happened to the American ingenuity? Didn’t you put a man on the moon?


There is an old adage: What goes up, must come down.

What would happen if about a quarter of the money allocated to both, the wildfire and flood disasters had been spent on redirecting the flood water along canals, then upwards and finally down again into the shrinking southwestern reservoirs? Perhaps one could even construct a few new ones. Many, new ones. After all, we have billions upon billions of dollars we’d saved from the damage no longer done by the fires and the floods. Don't we have highways, railways, that cut through tunnels, wind their way through the mountains? Don't we have lasers that cut through rock as though it were butter?

But how do we make the water rise over the mountains, you might well ask. Well, yes, it is a problem. Partially one could dynamite passages for our canals. Then the water would have to rise. It had been done before. By the Romans. Remember their aqueducts––some 2000 years ago? As for the water going uphill, well, here comes the old adage. Whatever goes up must come down. As the water comes down on the California’s side of the Great Divide, it generates hydroelectric power. Power that pumps the water up on the east side. A sort of perpetuum mobile. Once built the water is there for free. (And you don’t kill any salmons in the process!) Simple?

How do I know? Ask the engineers. Only don’t forget to tell them that they have billions upon billions of dollars to spend on the projects. It might get them interested. Or at least, start thinking. I’m just an architect. Retired, at that.

How do I know? Ask the engineers... Only don’t forget to tell them that they have billions upon billions of dollars to spend on the projects. It might get them interested. Or at least, start thinking. I’m just an architect. Retired, at that. But it may be of some interest to American engineers that the dam, now under construction, on the Yangtze River, to be completed in 2012, is estimated at $21,000,000,000. For those who do not like zeroes, this figure represents 21 billion. That's in American dollars.