Question of the Day - 16 April 2020

It's hard to say exactly. We haven't seen any data or projections on this question. But we can generalize, based on what we do know.

According to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, about 7% of Lake Mead water allocated to southern Nevada is consumed by Strip and downtown resorts and locals casinos. However, around 6% of that goes toward indoor use. That means most of it is eventually returned to the lake via sewers and sewage-processing plants; only a fraction of the water is lost to toilets and showers.

Meanwhile, most of the non-renewable water used by Strip resorts goes to evaporative cooling systems. 

Water conservation has been part of the resorts' consciousness since 1991, the first year that new hotel-casinos had to present a detailed water-conservation plan to the Water Authority before being approved for construction. Digital thermostats with motion detectors automatically adjust room temperatures when guests are vacant; low-flow shower heads and eco-friendly toilets save millions of gallons of water, as do guests using towels more than once. Water attractions and evaporative coolers (and in some cases cooling towers) have to use recycled water. That kind of thing.

Meanwhile, Nevada's allotment of Colorado River water that flows through Lake Mead is the smallest among the regions that share it: Arizona, southern California and northern Mexico. Nevada receives 300,000 acre-feet, about 2% of the available water from the Colorado River, each year. In total, Lake Mead supplies water for 25 million people, plus large-scale farming in California's Imperial Valley and central Arizona. 

So we'd say that saving a small percentage of water, of the already-small percentage of water that's lost to indoor use in hotel rooms, out of the 2% of Lake Mead that goes to Nevada, probably has a negligible impact on the water level of Lake Mead.