[Updated 1/26: A warm welcome to the folks from LADWP stopping by. Feel free to join the discussion.]
Las Vegas is the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the US. It’s in the middle of the Mojave, the driest desert in the US. Vegas gets the vast majority of its water from the Colorado River, which is not only oversubscribed — enough water is taken out of it that it no longer reaches the sea — but in the middle of an unprecedented drought that is very likely going to get far worse. There are even odds that Lake Mead will be dry by 2021, which means no water for Vegas.
The Las Vegas Sun has put together a fantastic multimedia piece on Las Vegas’ water future, featuring the usual blithe denials by industry and water utility flacks. A resort representative blandly says that casinos on The Strip account for “only eight percent” of Nevada’s water use, and a woman from the water utility rather angrily says that relying on conservation and limiting growth in the Vegas valley would be “irresponsible.”
Something’s gotta give, and the Sun’s video lets us know that Vegas’ city fathers and mothers expect said giving to be done by the Snake Valley, a desert oasis on the line between Nevada and Utah a couple hundred miles north. Snowmelt from Great Basin National Park, now feeding wetlands and local farmers’ fields, would be piped to Vegas to run Bellagio’s fountains.
Understandably, the folks who live in the Snake Valley are reluctant to go along with the plan, and you can find out more at their website at protectsnakevalley.com.
To those of us in California who know a little history, the whole thing brings a bit of déjà vu. From the PBS documentary Cadillac Desert
No. We should be fixing the mistakes of the past, not making new ones.
Though in the scheme of things isn’t California a much bigger consumer of the Colorado than Las Vegas? Particularly San Diego, which isn’t even in the river’s natural watershed?
Water ought to be reallocated based upon sustainable practices using historical low-flow years revised by the best scientific models and latest data.
Absolutely. Here’s the distribution according to the Colorado River Compact, in force since 1922, in millions of acre-feet per year:
California 4.40
Colorado 3.88
Arizona 2.85
Utah 1.73
Wyoming 1.05
New Mexico 0.84
Nevada 0.30
And since 1944, 1.5 million acre feet has to be delivered to Mexico.
That adds up, if I’m not mistaken, to 16.55 million acre-feet. Current thinking is that the average annual flow of the river is actually less than 14 million acre-feet per year. The compact is being renegotiated. The likelihood that Nevada will actually come out of those negotiations with more water is small, I’m thinking.
yeah, that’s why Diane and I are contemplating a move out of San Diego at some point—but the “wait until the kids are grown” argument is strong.
On the larger point, I don’t know what will make our society place any restraints on itself. This goes for “green” energy too. “We’ll need a lot of massive solar power plants in the desert to run our electric cars that will fight global warming,” seems to be the thinking now (Joseph Romm on Salon.com last April). Many comments yesterday on Salon.com ran along the lines of “the desert tortoise has to ‘take one for the team’.” What are the odds that Americans will use cars less and use bikes and transit more in order to protect the desert tortoise?
although, there was this other comment, which I found heartening: “America has turned into nothing but a huge freeway emptying into a shopping center, and it’s SO not inspiring to think of yet another way to power THAT.”
It’s things like this - the residing in places ill-suited to housing vast numbers of people - that shaped my dissertation research and makes me want to smack Bill McKibben whenever his “find your place and live there” advice comes up. Some of us, sir, love places where we very much should not live there; not everyone has the grace to fall in love with forgiving places like Vermont where you can cram a lot of folks in.
Western water law is one of the thorniest things I had to deal with in my research, and the Colorado Compact is one of the most insane.