Quakes and Water

In your (July 5) editorial, “Quake Wake-Up Call on Water,” you stated: “The need for additional emergency storage space is undeniable.” As an engineer who has studied and implemented fault-tolerant systems, I disagree. Massive emergency storage would indeed work. However, building a single huge reservoir has the same obvious problem as our present system: a single earthquake in the wrong place, breaking the dam, and we still have a disaster. But even multiple, smaller dams don’t seem to be the best solution.

Rather than accepting the interruption of our water flow, wouldn’t it be better to guarantee that it doesn’t stop? A common method of accomplishing this is to build more pipelines than you really must have, and to build them on different routes so they don’t all break at the same time.

Benefits of this approach are:

* When an earthquake breaks a pipeline, we don’t face the disaster of no water flow until the pipeline is repaired. There is, in fact, no problem at all, unless we are behind in the construction of the additional pipelines, in which case we have a drought.

* We must build these pipelines anyway as the population grows, so we are merely building them sooner.

* Pipelines do not damage sensitive environments nearly as much as reservoirs, nor do they displace whole neighborhoods.

LAURENCE P. FLORA, Valley Center