Donald Trump says he will divert 'large faucet' of the Columbia River south to thirsty California • Idaho Capital Sun

The Ice Harbor Dam is located on the lower Snake River in southeastern Washington. (Courtesy of Columbia River System Operations EIS)

This column was first posted on Rocky Barker’s Letters from the West blog on Sept. 17, 2024.

Former President Donald Trump suggested there was a “large faucet” up North that could solve all of California’s water needs for its cities, its farms and to wet down its forests so they don’t burn so fierce.

“You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet,” Trump said this month.

We call that faucet the Columbia River.

“You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles,” he said.

Folks in British Columbia reacted immediately.

“It’s not that simple. To me, it’s an uninformed opinion. It’s somebody that doesn’t fully understand how water works and doesn’t understand the intricacies of allocating water not only between two countries but also for the environment,” Tricia Stadnyk, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Calgary, told CTV TV in Calgary.

The Columbia River begins in Canada and flows south to Oregon. The Snake River is its largest tributary. This isn’t the first time that California and Nevada have looked north to get more water.

In 1990, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn won the unanimous vote of his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors to study transferring water from the Snake and Columbia. He said in the 90 billion gallons of water a day running into the Pacific Ocean from the Snake and Columbia basin are ‘sinful and wasteful.”

Sound familiar?

According to a story in the Christian Science Monitor, Dean Miller reported that an aqueduct system would start near Hagerman, Idaho, where the Snake River lies at about 3,000 feet above sea level. Pumping it up to about 6,500 feet above sea level near Jackpot, Nevada, would be expensive, but the flow downhill from there to Lake Mead could turn turbines to generate much of the electricity needed to run the pumps, Miller said. In well known economics, water, travels uphill toward money.

Then Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus appointed a bipartisan water panel to fight Hahn and California, and eventually, the idea died.

But Donald Trump has resurrected the idea. It comes as the Columbia River Treaty has recently been renegotiated. There was nothing in it about diverting our limited water to California.

But the U.S. Senate must approve the treaty before it is finalized. If Trump is elected, will he seek to rewrite the treaty so it diverts Columbia-Snake river water to California?

Correction: Trump’s exact quote has been corrected in the headline and body of this column.

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by Rocky Barker, Idaho Capital Sun September 20, 2024

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Rocky Barker is an award-winning journalist and author based in Idaho. He has written extensively about environmental issues and the American West. His book "Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America" was the inspiration for the TV movie "Firestorm: Last Stand at Yellowstone."He is the former environmental reporter for the Idaho Statesman,