Iranian hackers gained access to the control system at the Bowman Avenue Dam in 2013. The dam is some twenty miles from New York City, according to The Wall Street Journal. Yikes.
It's so ungodly hot in much of California right now that you can almost hear the sun sucking what's left of our reservoirs dry. But if a group of engineers and politicians would have had their way in 1964, the lower 48 would be swimming in water imported from the far North—all the way from Alaska.
Las Vegas gets 90 percent of its water from Lake Mead, the lake created by the Hoover Dam about 45 miles away. It’s also a lake that’s only half full—with water levels that are decreasing every year. Now the city must dig a massive tunnel that will dip deeper into the lake to ensure Las Vegas’s water supply doesn’t…
This week, for the first time in decades, the Colorado River flowed to its natural end in the Gulf of California. But it was the opposite of a natural event. The artificially engineered "pulse flow" that pushed the waters all the way to the Gulf required an unprecedented collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico,…
There's not much in rural Washington, but there are lot of dams. And dams mean hydroelectric power. Following the lure of cheap electricity, Bitcoin miners and their power-hungry server farms are making out for sleepy little towns in the Pacific Northwest.
Imagine you're a river herring, maybe about a foot long, swimming merrily upstream when you suddenly hit a giant concrete wall. How do you cross it? Engineers are now designing new fishways disguised as broad, rocky pools that help migrating fish make their way through dammed up rivers.
The floods in Colorado are being described as "Biblical," and for once that word seems to fit. Boulder, for example, usually gets around 15 inches of precipitation annually. This year, that amount has fallen in the ten days since September 9 alone. On September 12, they received nine inches in one day.
When Tsar Peter the Great founded the former Russian capital city of Saint Petersburg more than 300 years ago, he intended it to provide a "window on the Baltic." Turns out, that window was more of a screen door. To protect itself, the city built a dam that took almost 300 years and $3.85 billion to complete.
California's Matilija Dam is a huge mistake. Over 60 years after its construction, engineers and ecologists are realizing it does more harm than good—a feeling shared by the rogue artists who painted huge, easy instructions as a fix.