The Water situation

Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are officially under 30% for the first time ever.    And meterologists are forecasting a "triple-dip" La Nina for the upcoming year.  Translation - its forecasted to be another drought stricken year for the Southwest.  So how many more points does that water level drop?

I know Vegas is recycling water but clearly thats not enough to keep up with demand.   I used to think it would be nice to have a winter home there when I retire but I'm beginning to think Vegas will be uninhabitable in 15 years.    

Meanwhile they keep cutting out another 100 Sq/miles of land to build more houses every few years.    Decreasing  water with increasing demand.  Sounds like a pretty bad scenario.    People talk like its some kind of problem 50 years down the road.   To my untrained eye it seems like something that will be a crisis much faster than that.

Hope I'm wrong.  What are local people saying? 

         The current "water situation" has been forthcoming for years - and the past measures taken to handle this problem have only slowed down the ever receeding water levels. With the population growth of new residents moving to Vegas and the building of new homes,apartments and casinos, the water problem will only get worse. The water from the Hoover Dam is a source of water for 7 western states ( Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, California, New Mexico and Nevada) and a portion of Mexico. I predict that a possible solution to Nevada's problem will entail adjusting and reallocating the waters from these 6 other states (and Mexico), and for these other states to find other water sources. I believe that politics has allowed this forthcoming crisis to morph into the crisis that Nevada now finds itself. One thing is for sure, If nothing is done to remedy this problem, Vegas and Nevada will suffer greatly. 

Actually, "under 30%" really means "down to the last 5%." 25% of Lake Mead is "deadpool," meaning it's water that can't be accessed. That "third straw" project is a stopgap, in that it can theoretically suck the lake down to 18% (at which point it's just a useless, silt-filled, stagnant puddle). However, because of various factors such as cavitation and pumping capacity, it can't really get down to that 18%.

It's actually worse than you think. The deadpool level of 25% is the point where the lake drops below the lowest hydroelectric intake. When you get there, no more electricity generation. Already, the amount of acre-feet flowing through the turbines has diminished by a third from twenty years ago--and so has the amount of power generated. AND, the aforementioned cavitation problem--which is when air pockets get mixed into the intake water flow--will be much more destructive to the power intakes, which were built almost 90 years ago, then they will be to the third straw.

The "emergency" measure will be to release more water from Lake Powell. While that obviously doesn't increase the amount of water available per se, it does reduce two factors that affect the supply: surface evaporation and percolation into the surrounding sandstone (which is pretty goddamn porous). Emptying Lake Powell completely would fill Lake Mead to about 2/3 and would save several hundred thousand gallons a year that would otherwise be lost to seepage and evaporation. However, the political impact of essentially killing off Lake Powell would be huge. Utah and Arizona (the two states where Powell is located) would raise holy hell at the prospect of choking off a major source of tourist revenue just to save Las Vegas' bacon. Not to mention all the rich people who have been watching their houseboats sink lower and lower.

The issues over allocation stem from the fact that the Colorado River Compact, signed in 1922 among the seven Colorado River watershed states, divided up the river's flow based on amounts that have never been reached since. They didn't have much data to go on--three decades' worth of measurements at most--and they overestimated the river's annual flow. It has never had the amount allocated, meaning that the river is in perpetual "deficit."

For a long time, this wasn't a problem. Nevada never came close to using its allocation until quite recently, because Las Vegas barely existed until the 1930s and was still a pretty small town for decades afterward. The Wasatch Front in Utah and the Front Range in Colorado, the respective population centers of the two states, are both quite distant from the Colorado in miles and topography. Arizona had a relatively small population before the advent of air conditioning. So the other six states were happy to let their allocations go to California--they had all they needed.

The water disputes that erupted between Arizona and California in the 1980s and 1990s were an object lesson for Las Vegas. Arizona wanted its full allocation, which would mean that California had to scale its own allocation back. Even then, Nevada's allocation was enough for Vegas--in fact, Nevada has never used its entire allocated percentage. In some cases, it traded allocated water to California and Arizona for future considerations--a practice called "water banking." Even so, Vegas anticipated a time when its allocation might be challenged or, in case of a basin-wide drought (like now), rationed. So the city and county (Clark) embarked on an aggressive water conservation campaign. The result is that today, Las Vegas uses less water than it did ten years ago, even though it's several hundred thousand greater in population.

So it's not politics--it's simple climate change. In point of fact, the Basin states have shown a remarkable degree of cooperation and willingness to compromise in the face of a dwindling water supply. Those who agreed to the Compact had not the remotest clue that the Southwest would grow as it did--back then, it was still considered a wasteland. And, as I said, they had bad information regarding just how much water was and would be in the Colorado.

Another kicker has been that agricultural use in Arizona and California dried up the Colorado to the point where it no longer reached the Gulf of California, which violated a treaty drafted in 1963 that guarantees at least 1 million acre-feet of water be released to Mexico. And when farmers in CA and AZ released additional water back into the Colorado, it was so salt- and mineral-laden that it killed crops in Mexico. So we built a huge desalinization plant in Yuma--but we're still obligated to deliver that minimum amount of water to them, and that amount was not included in the Compact.

The reality is that the Colorado can't supply all the needs of the Basin states, and there are precious few other water sources. So the only two solutions are: all the Basin states should emulate Las Vegas and acknowledge the fact that they live in a desert, and conserve water accordingly; or, some immense multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle can be built to bring water down from the Pacific Northwest or even Canada.

(And we could stop fucking up the earth's climate, but that ship has probably sailed.)

 Whatever decisions that will be made about this issue will be politically driven and decided.

Interesting.    

I dont know what the day of reckoning is but I think its closer than people are willing to say out loud.    Indianapolis is not a Utopia but one good thing is I dont have to worry about water =)     We just need more craps tables, 24 hour bars and a good brunch buffet place.

This has been a subject of interest for me for some time now. I was surprised to learn just how water-conservationist Vegas has become. And the public is misinformed about a lot of it, such as the "wasteful" Bellagio fountains--which are supplied by an aquifer directly beneath the property that isn't connected to the Vegas municipal water system--or the proliferation of golf courses, most of which have converted to using wastewater that had no other use. Vegas also imposes crushing tiered costs on people who use too much water.