I was watching the rain today, and was wondering why places like Africa don’t get water. “Because it doesn’t rain,” was the obvious answer. So, if the water won’t come to them why not take the… water… to them… (Dammit, I’ve never been able to use that cliché).
But anyway, my idea is this. Africa is surrounded by water. Like a farmer bringing water to his land from a near by river, why not do that for the centre of the country, where they’re dying of thirst? The idea is stupidly simple, and I’m sure there’s a glaringly obvious problem with this idea, but no one has been able to point one out to me yet.
Basically, dig a huge river (I suppose that would be called a canal) ultimately from one side of Africa to the other. Right along the equator. It’ll fill with sea water. They obviously can’t drink sea water though. But I’ve thought of that too!
Along side this new canal build a bus stop like building over the top of it. The water will evaporate and condense on the plastic of the cover and run down the sides into some sort of container or pipe, which will lead the water to a water well. It’ll now be fresh water and clean enough to drink.
The biggest barrier I guess would be funding it, but I can’t imagine that a plastic sheet and a few pipes could be that expensive. Some company could just donate them. And I’m sure the Africans would happily work for free to build the river – after all, they’re getting fresh water at the end of it.
So, tell me why this is a dumb idea?
It took like 14 years to build the panama canal, which is only 48 miles long and 27,500 people died in the process. The canal you’d need would be about 3,000 miles long and would have to irrigate a continent larger than the USA, western europe, china, india and argentina put together.
It’d also have to be enormously wide so as to provide enough water so that it doesn’t evaporate before getting anywhere near to where it needs to be. The costs in earth moving equipment alone would probably be in the trillions, plus fuel and so on.
Setting up some kind of “evaporate and catch the clean water” would, considering he size of canal needed, be quite an engineering feat and need more than some plastic sheets stretched across it.
Also, the atlantic would empty out and then we’d be buggered.
You wouldn’t start off the aim of doing the entire 3,000 miles. Just do fifty miles into the country, probably even less. A small community would pop up around that source of water and they can carry on building it.
You only need water to have a few feet of surface water before it can start evaporating.
Earth moving equipment? Just use a bloody shovel. My dad built a seven foot pond that was pretty large up himself in one day, with a shovel.
Of course it would be an engineering feat. Why would anything less give an entire country water?
Don’t most developed countries have water purification plant technology which could be imported to Africa?
I suppose if you really wanted to do it the only major problem would be funding, the amount of work/technology/resources etc needed would be… well I’m no mathmatician but a lot by my guess. No country really has the funds to be able to supply another country, even on loan or collectively to complete a project like that. Considering their own money problems as well.
I do wonder about the environmental concerns of a project that big, while editing the landscape of a continent to create something which could affect the world.
I suppose to stop the atlantic emptying out you could possibly build a dam or two along it… although I’m not really sure how they work either.
Just my first thoughts, probably not right but hey…
You went from irrigating the entire continent to just fifty miles and you’re comparing it to a seven foot pond now?
I think you’re hugely underestimating the size, complexity and cost of that project.
Compare it to the Hoover dam which was built by the richest and most advanced nation on the planet and then compare it to a project several orders of magnitude more impressive.
Don’t forget that the people who would start the project, on the coast, have water or have a much easier way of getting water with desalination plants. Why go to all that cost and trouble for people far away in another country?
I agree. We should all just give in and leave them to die.
I wasn’t saying that. I was just saying that the big, big, big project you’re proposing could possibly be too big… The small things that are being done by charities now are pushing them along and maybe one day they’ll be able to fund their own big projects with a little help from us, not us fund their projects with a little help from them.
Sometimes a countries gotta do things their own way, in their own time. Like Britain did in it’s warring way. xx
No one, absolutely no one said that Shane. Save the strawman for someone else.
Other projects would, and are, do a better job and it’s not even as if Africa is one huge desert. The huge famines that, for example, Ethiopia had were more to do with civil war than just lack of water.
Shane, E-mail me. I have an NGO called Walking on Water and I am planning on doing exactly that – irrigating SubSaharan Africa- because it can be done. Love to talk, Melissa