I can’t believe anyone seriously proposed pumping Pacific Ocean water into the Great Salt Lake, because it is being considered for the Dead Sea in Israel. A pipeline to the Dead Sea has some enormous differences.
The Dead Sea is only fifty miles from the Mediterranean Sea, and it is below sea level, so the pipeline path is almost all downhill. Even with those advantages, it may be prohibitively expensive. The Great Salt Lake watershed boundary is about 5,100 feet above sea level, and is at least 700 miles from the Pacific. If the pipeline goes around the Sierra Nevada Mountains, then it will be much longer than 700 miles. If it goes over the mountains, water will have to be pumped up to about 8,000 feet altitude.
Better would be to pump the Snake River at Pocatello over the same pass that originally drained Lake Bonneville. That would be less than 100 miles away, and less than a thousand feet in altitude, plus it would be fresh water. Utah doesn’t need more salt. The problem, of course, is that if Utah asked Idaho for permission to take hundreds of millions of gallons of Snake River water, the response would be some version of, “you’re taking our water over our dead bodies.” Let’s get real, people. We have to work with what little water we have in the Great Basin.
Gene Mahalko, Salt Lake City
