Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2015 14:03:47 -0500
From: J
Subject: Re: Chatham Chatlist #5185
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:11 AM, Chatham Chatlist wrote:
>
> ——————– 8 ——————–
> Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 10:13:38 -0500
> From: Taylor Kish
> Subject: Here we go again. . .
>
>
I do not necessarily disagree with you (I often agree with you more than disagree) but I would like you to explain or expand upon these two statements:
> “Fighting the good fight” to steal another man’s property will NOT make anyone’s life better. Nobody.
> California has no shortage of water. California has a shortage of political will to capture and store water like Jordan Lake. Chatham County and North Carolina have no shortage of water. We lack the
> vision and political will to provide for the capture and storage of water for the future. Chatham County commissioners would rather construct HUGE “Justice” centers and “Agriculture” buildings with the
> huge increase of tax revenues based on over-inflated property values.
I presume that you DO understand how many, if not most, of these reservoirs came to be. Many of them involve people being forced into selling their property or having it taken from them under the guise of eminent domain or threat of having their property condemned and made worthless by the government. So would you propose California and North Carolina steal other people’s property in order to start storing water? Jordan Lake, in particular, started as a flood control project, causing several farming families to lose their land and endure a sort of forced relocation. Much in the same way the many lakes in the TVA system came into being. Close to my home town, in Smith Mountain Lake, much the same story, and like some TVA lakes, under the waters of Smith Mountain Lake lie a couple of full towns. Entire towns of personal property that were taken from their owners. In fact, pretty much every man-made lake in NC and the US required someone having their property stolen from them.
I don’t propose to have any real answer, but you seem to contradict yourself there in saying that stealing another man’s property will not make anyone’s life better while going on to suggest that CA and NC should have the political will to steal another man’s property to capture and store water like Jordan Lake, which presumably would make many people’s lives better by providing more water for them.
> Here is a crazy idea. . .How about digging out the bottom of Jordan Lake to build higher shorelines allowing doubling or tripling capacity? Starting now and raising 10 miles of shoreline per year would be
> complete by 2033. (OK. I am not an engineer but the point is valid. We COULD plan and implement processes NOW to capture and store LOTS more water for the future.)
It’s not a bad idea, actually, deepening the lake except for a few issues and likely many more that I’m neglecting here:
* The dam on Jordan Lake is an earthen dam. Deepening the lake would increase the volume and weight of the water and it is likely that the entire dam would need to be replaced with a much larger, much more expensive concrete dam, which the tax payers would have to pay for.
* You can’t just dredge out the bottom without draining it first. It’s a man-made lake, and the bottom is littered with things that don’t do well for dredging operations like trees, houses, buildings, sunken equipment, etc.
* The dirt has to go somewhere. Just piling it up on the shore is a non-starter for many reasons, not the least of which is environmental, and not in the sense of the EPA getting involved but the simple fact that as a conscientious builder you would not want to destroy the watersheds downstream simply because you would again be destroying OTHER people’s property.
* Dredging the entire thing to deepen it would be ridiculously expensive, again, an increased cost that us tax payers would have to fork over.
Comparing the cost of the Justice center and a new Ag building to the cost of a new Dam and dredging or digging operations to increase the capacity of Jordan Lake is a bit like comparing the cost of building a child’s play house out of scrap lumber and the cost of building a 2500 square foot modern home. The two are simply not comparable.