Nawapa Water Diversion Plan: 1960s scheme sought to reroute northern rivers

In 1964, American engineers at the Ralph M Parsons Corporation drew up one of the most ambitious infrastructure plans in history, a scheme called the North American Water and Power Alliance, or Nawapa. The idea was to capture excess river water from Alaska and northwestern Canada and send it south through the Rocky Mountain Trench, across the Rockies, and into the water-starved plains and deserts of the United States and northern Mexico. It involved hundreds of dams, canals and tunnels, and was seriously discussed in the US Congress as a project comparable in scale to the space programme. Six decades later, the plan never left the drawing board, but it still shapes conversations about water scarcity today.What was the Nawapa water diversion planNawapa stood for the North American Water and Power Alliance, a continental water management scheme first conceived in the 1950s and developed into a detailed engineering blueprint in 1964. According to the Smithsonian Institution's archival records, the plan was designed by the Ralph M Parsons Corporation to collect surplus water from the northwestern part of the continent and distribute it to water-deficient regions across seven Canadian p...