Deke Castleman responds:
Whoa. Now there's an obscure point to take from the answer to a question about a good overnight trip into Nevada.
Though obscure, however, it's a great question, and like all water issues in the American West (Pyramid and Walker lakes in northern Nevada, Mono Lake in central California, the Klamath Basin in Oregon, and especially the Salton Sea in southern California, to name just a few), the answer is complex -- fraught with political controversies, scientific uncertainties, commercial enormities, personal animosities, and typical absurdities. I could write a book on the "Las Vegas water question" (though I'm not going to, God help me), so I'll try to keep this answer brief.
The tradition in Nevada water usage has been "limited to the nearest best use." In other words, by custom and fairly stringent law, the available water has been devoted to actual need, as opposed to being sold off (as has been the case in California) to the highest bidder (the Owens Valley is a case in point). However, with Las Vegas growing so quickly and willing to throw big big money at its water problem, this could change in the foreseeable future.
At the moment, Las Vegas water comes almost entirely from the 300,000 acre-feet per year it’s allotted under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act. (An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre in a foot of water.) By comparison, Arizona gets 2.8 million acre-feet and California gets 4.4 million acre-feet.
Now, if you hadn’t noticed, allow me to point out that Las Vegas has grown somewhat since 1928; today, 300,000 acre-feet is barely adequate to supply the water needs of a metropolitan area of more than 1.5 million people. Vegas has taken some short-term and temporary measures (a water-banking agreement with Arizona and California, use of Virgin River water, among a few others), but long term, Vegas needs what amounts to a water miracle.
Enter the groundwater in eastern Nevada.
Nevada legend has long held that much of the state is underlain by carbonate aquifers, meaning underground rivers, even seas. Northern Nevada Paiute mythology is full of lake monsters and "water babies" and stories are told of bodies disappearing into the depths of Pyramid Lake and reappearing on the surface of Walker Lake 150 miles away.
The aborted MX missile project of the Reagan era, slated to be built in east-central Nevada, stimulated the United States Geological Survey to plumb the depths of the widespread belief in a extensive limestone aquifer under the state. The USGS sunk deep wells and found, much to the amazement of Nevada water officials and the dismay of missile silo engineers, "astonishing" amounts of water.
Then, in the early ‘90s, in conjunction with the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository project, further USGS reports were released. They indicated that at least one and possibly two carbonate aquifers, as deep as 6,000 feet below the surface, could flow from western Idaho all the way to Death Valley, could contain what it called an "ocean" of fresh water, and could be closest to the surface in eastern Nevada from Pahranagat to Snake valleys. (This is where my mention of the Meadow Valley Wash in the previous QoD links up.)
Coyote Springs, for example, is a valley that straddles the border between Clark and Lincoln counties, only an hour by car from downtown Vegas. A well was sunk down to 685 feet that pumped 4,500 gallons a minute for 30 straight days and "it didn’t impact the water table at all."
Anyway, that’s the basic hydrology of it, which answers your question. No one knows for sure how much water lies under eastern Nevada, how far the aquifers extend, or who’ll wind up with the precious H20 in the end.
As for your second question, a quiet battle is raging for the rights to all that water. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Vidler Water Company, the Lincoln and White Pine county commissioners, farmers and ranchers, the feds, even probably Steve Wynn, Oscar Goodman, and Wayne Newton are all involved in the power struggle. But that’s an answer for another question.
