Has anyone ever given any thought to trying to capture all the floodwaters that seem to be increasing lately, and moving them to the more drought affected areas?
Seems like it would be a nightmare to purify. Perhaps useful for agricultural applications, but for drinking and household use…. Most water supplies don’t have e.g., human bodies floating in them.
Not a scientist, happy to be proven wrong here, but that’s my gut.
Not just bodies. When working around flood waters its recommended to wear hazmat gear because the water is contaminated by human waste from septic tanks, dead animals, petrol, oil, various poisons and fertilizers, chemicals from stuff like paint, etc.
Probably could be cleaned but even for agri use it would be crazy expensive.
I know its not really comparable, but seawater has almost as many pollutants in it and governments are actively researching desalination tech
As I understand, desal tech is available though it’s prohibitively expensive, both in terms of acquisition and operations.
Be willing to bet the areas affected by severe droughts would happily try to cover it
To be clear it’s ‘prohibitively expensive’ on a governmental scale.
There’s so few places that have that combo of “not enough water” and “large amounts of wealth” that desalinization just isn’t used a lot.
I don’t think you want to use dead body soup in ag either for the same reason using human waste as fertilizer isn’t done.
Pretty sure there are existing methods of filtering such things out but i havent looked into it that deep(no pun intended)
If you filter the water through some sand, soil etc, it’s clean enough for many uses. There are systems that treat toilet water this way and then release the water into the environment. You just need lots of land in order to filter a small volume of water, so this method doesn’t really scale up very well.
