You’re referring to the intake or "third straw" being dug into Lake Mead, whose ebbing depth threatens to leave the existing intakes high and dry and useless. (That’d be pretty bad for Las Vegas, which gets nearly all its water from the lake.) The three-mile, $800 million pipeline had a stop-and-start 2012 but is projected for a mid-2014 completion, its original cost having almost doubled over four and a half years.
When last we heard, progress was stymied by the need to remove and replace several of the four-dozen, 300-pound cutter disks on the front of a giant bore drill that’s carving the straw’s pathway. This worm-like (600 feet long and 18 months in the making) machine grinds away 600 feet underground, so changing out the cutters is a tricky business -- one that was expected to keep the drill idle through year’s end. (When you have to be pushed 20 feet through a 30-inch round pipe to reach your "workstation," things tend to go slowly.)
Although water from Lake Mead is seeping into the newly created tunnel, the intake has a long way to go. As of early December, it had advanced only 1,400 feet, slightly over a tenth of the distance it needs to bore to reach the lakebed. Fortunately, much of the work on the Lake Mead end of the intake has already been completed, while problems with the tunnel were being sorted out.
Theoretically, the straw should have reached Lake Mead already, work having begun in June 2008. But that proved a false start. Contractors Impreglio and S.A. Healy Co. misjudged the direction of their tunnel, which had to be abandoned due to flooding. In December 2009, Las Vegas Review-Journal tunnel chronicler Henry Brean reported that 300 gallons of water were being pumped out of the fissure: "The contractor expected to hit water, just not this much this soon," he noted dryly. Impreglio persisted but struck a fault zone in July 2010, setting off a series of floods that wrote finis to the first tunnel.
A second attempt, begun early this year, is proceeding more successfully but ground to a tragic halt last June when construction worker Thomas Albert Turner was killed while installing one of the massive (20 feet in diameter) concrete "rings" through which the lake water will eventually flow, beneath Saddle Island. (It is the only fatality incurred on the project.) For two weeks, drilling was halted until OSHA gave the ‘all clear’ to resume drilling. A look inside the tunnel can be found here, courtesy of the R-J, while video footage is provided by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, whose baby the "third straw" is.
