Funny that I should be posting about Las Vegas and its water. Just yesterday, I reconnected with a friend from the late 1970s, Cady Johnson, now a uranium geologist (by the way, business is booming for him now - his phone is ringing off the hook).
Cady was a PhD student at the University of Nevada-Reno in 1976 and I was fresh out of the U of AZ and learning about Great Basin hydrology under the tutelage of people like the legendary George H. "Burke" Maxey and his former student Marty Mifflin at the Desert Research Institute. Burke died in 1977, but Marty still works as a consultant in Las Vegas, and Cady has worked for him. We started talking about the Great Basin carbonate aquifer system(s) and the efforts (including mine) to understand it over the past 40+ years. This is relevant to today's post, because it's (presumably) water from this aquifer system that Las Vegas wants. It's important to know the subsurface "plumbing", and which valleys are interconnected (see my 22 April 2007 post).
Back to the present now.
While perusing the Aquafornia blog I stumbled across yet another story about Las Vegas' inexorable thirst for water, as reported by Las Vegas Now (KLAS-TV Channel 8). Seems that things are getting a bit dire in Sin City. That story, posted on 16 August 2007, generated about 100,000 hits (read about the overwhelming response here).
In the story Pat Mulroy of the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) warned that the region is just a few years from a serious water shortage. What's needed now is the expenditure of $45M for pumps for the second drinking water intake so that the dropping level in Lake Mead won't leave the SNWA without the ability to withdraw water (since the first intake will above the lake level).
Last April SNWA received approval from the Nevada State Engineer to pump ground water (40,000 acre-feet per year) from rural eastern Nevada (again, see my 22 April 2007 post) and pipe it to the Las Vegas area. But that is still 3-5 years away, and once it starts, monitoring must show no adverse impacts.
The following material is directly from the Las Vegas Now article.
Shortages are likely to start in 2010. The first water will not come through the pipeline until two years after that.
"We have a ground water bank in the state of Arizona that will be able to cover the first couple shortages," said Mulroy.
The news gets worse though. If nothing changes with the drought, Mulroy says without a pipeline bringing drinking water from sources other than Lake Mead, the equivalent of 256,000 people would not have water when doing this in 2010.
By 2011, the gap in water use and water supply would affect 404,000 people. The problem rises to half a million people by 2012.
"Understand that we cannot conserve our way out of a drought -- totally," said Shari Buck, a Water Authority board member.
"You have very little room to cut even deeper. You have to protect our reserves, and we have to develop a water supply that is separate and apart from the Colorado River," said Mulroy.
Mulroy adds that Las Vegas needs that extra water now to protect families and secure our growth. The need is heightened by the drought. The Water Authority data show the drought is getting worse.
Doesn't sound good, folks, particularly when scientists are now talking about "megadroughts" (50+ years in length) that have occurred in the Southwest. If they have occurred cyclically in the past, they are likely to occur again in the future (or perhaps we are in the midst of one now).
I posted about this dilemma back on 21 July 2007. It may be time to tie land use planning directly to water planning (Hmmm....didn't a well-known Western water figure liken this to Communism or socialism several years back?). Communities such as Las Vegas need to figure out what the carrying capacity of their region is (and I don't mean the carrying capacity of their water system). There also needs to be some consideration given to the effects their quest for water will have on others outside their area. As the title of this post implies, when it comes to water, "what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas."
I discussed the struggle to secure more water for the Southwest on 21 July 2007, reporting the results of meeting of some of the Southwest's foremost water managers. But I read nothing innovative or visionary - just the SOS.
Perhaps it is time to consider the prospect of a 50-year drought and limits to growth. The latter is something we Americans dislike because it runs counter to our belief system - growth is good, and don't tell me where I can or can't live.
I will leave you with a few choice words from Jared Diamond, the author of the excellent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in which he examined why some societies succeeded and some failed (Easter Island, early Norse in Greenland, et al.). At a lecture in Albuquerque a few years ago he was asked if there was some common thread that linked those societies that failed. His reply: there was a failure to reexamine and change their core values in the face of change.
Sound familiar?
"In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king." -- Anonymous
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