When I came to work here, our attitude was, “Just shut up and turn on the faucet.” That was a huge mistake. We were all going to run out of water in 1995.
—Patricia Mulroy,
water czar of Las Vegas since 1989
IF YOU START AT THE SOUTHERN END of the Strip in Las Vegas, the first resort you come to is Mandalay Bay, on the left as you walk north. Mandalay Bay’s main entrance is flanked by waterfalls cascading over tall, faux boulders and cliffs into a tropical lagoon. Inside, the hotel is home to a 1.6-million-gallon slice of the Pacific Ocean, the Shark Reef Aquarium, which includes clear tunnels that allow you to walk among the hundred resident sharks. Mandalay Bay is also known for a pool area designed like a beach, with five pools, set among eleven acres of what the hotel describes as “real sand”—5 million pounds of it.
As you stroll north, just a block up from Mandalay Bay, you come upon a half-size version of the Statue of Liberty, standing on her pedestal in the water of New York harbor, torch raised high over the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard (as the Strip is officially named). Right next to Lady Liberty floats a New York City fireboat, with five jets of water arcing festively into the Hudson River twenty-four hours a day. Just beyond the fireboat, you are alongside a miniature version of the Brooklyn Bridge, which naturally spans the East River.
One casino farther along is the brand-new CityCenter complex, which includes the Aria hotel. Although you can’t quite see it from the sidewalk, the Aria’s main entrance is anchored by not one but two fountains, both from the world-renowned water design firm WET. One of the fountains is a curving wall of water 281 feet long, almost as long as a football field, that flanks the hotel’s entrance. Waves of water pour over the top ledge of the twenty-four-foot-tall wall, and are slowed and shaped by tiny squares of stone along the wall’s surface. Sometimes torrents cascade over the top, sometimes just modest pulses. Visitors stand transfixed by the waves coursing along the face of the wall, as if watching waves break onto a beach. In a Mojave Desert town where there are seventy-two days a year when it’s 100 degrees or hotter, but just nineteen days a year when it rains, the Aria’s sweeping horizontal fountain creates the mood of a Zen water garden at the entrance to a four-thousand-room casino hotel.1
In the same block as CityCenter is the Bellagio, a five-star luxury hotel that is as famous for its fountain as for its rooms, its service, and its cuisine. The Fountains of Bellagio are a Vegas attraction all their own, drawing thousands of spectators each night, who surround a man-made lake of 8.5 acres in which the fountain sits. The lake holds 22 million gallons of water, and the fountain is composed of 1,214 jets, shooters, and fan sprayers, all computer-controlled to perform in tight coordination with music, from show tunes to Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” The fountain, whose arcs of jets stretch across the length of three football fields, creates rippling curtains of water that soar up 200, 300, even 400 feet high. Each night, starting at 8 p.m., the fountain gives four absolutely captivating performances an hour—you can stand on the sidewalk, in a town where not a single month averages even one inch of rain, and watch a fountain that, at any given moment, lofts 17,000 gallons of water into the air. The fountain is matched inside the Bellagio by an 1,800-seat theater whose stage is a tank of 2 million gallons of water, where each night acrobats from Cirque du Soleil perform a water opera called O (for the French word for water, eau).
And that’s just the beginning, just the first third of a “water walk” up the Vegas Strip. In the next block up from the Bellagio is the Mirage, which has a signature volcano out front that erupts on the hour every night and sits in the middle of a lagoon. Deep inside the Mirage is a dolphin habitat—yes, another aquarium inside a casino—home to what the hotel calls “a family of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins,” eight in all, including a couple born in captivity right on the Strip, all now living in a 2.5-million-gallon seawater habitat presided over by celebrity animal trainers Siegfried and Roy.
Across the street from the Mirage is the Venetian—a hotel built around the theme of Venice’s canals. Right in front is the Venetian’s lagoon, where you can ride around in a gondola poled by a singing gondolier in Italian costume.
Let’s pause just a moment and take stock. In the space of a two-mile walk through the desert, and only crossing the street once, we’ve encountered three lagoons, a set of tropical waterfalls, the shark-infested Pacific, the dolphin-dappled Atlantic, an aquatic theater with a 2-million-gallon stage, a water-spouting fireboat, a ninety-yard-long wall of pulsing waves, the canals of Venice, and what was until 2009 the largest fountain in the world. Without noticing, actually, we walked right by what may be the only successful artificial rainstorm in the United States (inside the shops at the Planet Hollywood hotel). And we can’t forget the sexy water—this stretch of vacation fantasyland also includes five adults-only topless swimming pools, each with a suggestive name, including Venus at Caesars Palace, Bare at the Mirage, and Liquid at the Aria.
Some people think that the obsession in Las Vegas is money—or, more precisely, easy money.
Las Vegas itself wants the obsession in Las Vegas to be regret-free sin (“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”).
But the real obsession in Vegas is water—displaying it, unfurling it, playing with it, flaunting it.
Say what you will about Vegas, about the shows and the showgirls, about the slot machines at the airport gates and the craps tables that never close and the images of Donny and Marie Osmond plastered twenty stories high across the face of the Flamingo hotel—the most amazing thing may be that a hundred sharks and eight bottlenose dolphins live right on the Strip, and some of them are Nevada natives.
There is no two-mile stretch of ground anywhere in the United States that has such a density of water features, water attractions, and sheer water exuberance. Las Vegas, which can invest something as routine as breakfast with outlandish extravagance, has taken our most unassuming substance and unleashed it as the embodiment of glamour, mystery, power, and allure. In the way that only Las Vegas can, it has created a whole new category—ostentatious water.
The Strip is a demonstration of water imagination, of water mastery, and also of absolute water confidence.
It’s all the more remarkable because Las Vegas is the driest city in the United States—indeed, it’s not even a contest. Of the 280 cities in the United States with at least 100,000 people, Las Vegas is No. 280 in precipitation and No. 280 in number of days each year that it rains. Las Vegas gets 4.49 inches of precipitation a year. And it rains or snows, on average, just nineteen days a year.2
Even places of legendary dryness are two or three times as wet as Las Vegas—Phoenix, Arizona (8.29 inches, 28 days), El Paso, Texas (9.43 inches, 42 days), Los Angeles, California (13.15 inches, 33 days).
Las Vegas is no El Paso, though—it is a metropolis with 2 million residents and 36 million visitors a year. Ninety percent of its water comes from a single source, Lake Mead, the spectacular, man-made reservoir created on the Colorado River by Hoover Dam. Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, winding for 110 miles through the desert canyons of Nevada and Arizona. When Lake Mead is full, it holds a sixty-year supply of water for Las Vegas. Indeed, Lake Mead is so big, if every municipal water system in the United States could somehow tap it, it could supply all the water delivered by water utilities in the United States for 210 days.3
But Las Vegas is legally allowed to take only a tiny sliver of Lake Mead water—300,000 acre-feet a year, 98 billion gallons. All the water Las Vegas is allowed lowers the lake between two and three feet.4 Las Vegas’s allocation is about 4 percent of what everybody else gets to take from Lake Mead—96 percent of the water people use from Lake Mead goes to either California or Arizona. And Las Vegas’s allocation is fixed in law, just as the allocations of California and Arizona are fixed—so the amount of water Las Vegas has access to hasn’t changed even as Las Vegas’s population has doubled, and doubled again, even as the city has added 100,000 new hotel rooms, along with fountains and waterfalls, swimming pools and shark tanks.5
If you’re running the Las Vegas water system, it has been a harrowing twenty years, watching with a combination of fascination and queasiness as your desert city has grown so fast that, from 1990 to 2007, it added 60,000 new residents every single year, without adding any new sources of water for them. Even according to Las Vegas’s most conservative water-use figures, 60,000 new people require 5.3 billion gallons of new water a year. And 60,000 new residents was only typical—in 2004, 105,000 new residents settled in town, as if everyone in Berkeley, California, had picked up and moved to Las Vegas, along with their need for 9 billion gallons of water a year.6
In big-picture terms, between 1990 and 2009, Las Vegas nearly tripled in population.
What’s even scarier is that for the last ten years, the rainfall and snowfall that everyone along the Colorado River had become accustomed to for the last century fell off dramatically. By 2010, Lake Mead was down to 41 percent of capacity—which is to say, the largest reservoir in America was more than half empty. As recently as January 2000, Lake Mead was within seven feet of being full. Lake Mead in mid-2010 is 125 feet lower than it was ten years earlier—a lake that is 110 miles long has lost a stunning 125 feet of water depth in just a decade. Forget how much drinking and irrigation water that is—it’s enough water to put the Strip, and everyone of its hotels, at the bottom of a lake a half-mile deep.7
It is just as easy to make fun of Las Vegas as it is to have fun there—who really needs to market “real sand” in the middle of a desert? Who builds the world’s largest fountain in the middle of the driest city in the country? Why visit a fake Eiffel Tower and a fake Brooklyn Bridge when it’s just as easy to visit the actual Eiffel Tower and the actual Brooklyn Bridge?
But that easy snickering ignores the most important fact. We love Las Vegas. The town gets 36 million visitors a year—86 percent of whom are Americans; 10 percent of the country visits Vegas every year.8
And so although you’d never know it on the Strip or in the new subdivisions of the bedroom community of Henderson, Las Vegas doesn’t have water challenges or water troubles. Las Vegas has a water emergency. People are working on the emergency twenty-four hours a day, in fact, desperately trying to stave off what could become a catastrophic water crisis.
The first of Las Vegas’s two big water intakes—the huge pipes through which the city literally sucks its water out of Lake Mead—is just 38 feet from breaking the surface. A couple more dry years and Intake 1 could literally be sucking air. It’s normally safe under 125 feet or more of water.9
With the fountains jetting and the waterfalls cascading and the gondoliers serenading, it would be easy to add an absolute water heedlessness to the sins of Vegas. As the water is literally disappearing into the sand, the main Las Vegas tourism Web site still opens to a picture of a gorgeous come-hither brunette, in front of a shimmering turquoise swimming pool, with the line “Welcome to Lake Dowhatyawanna.”
But as is often the case in Las Vegas, everything is not quite as it looks. Las Vegas may seem to be gambling away the last of its water currency without either concern or a plan. But in fact, Las Vegas is far more advanced in both water consciousness and water management than almost anywhere else in the country.
PATRICIA MULROY HAD ALREADY been head of all water in metropolitan Las Vegas for thirteen years, she had faced down the casino moguls and the real estate developers, she had outmaneuvered, and lassoed, the West’s water bureaucrats with the speed and agility of a cowgirl, and she had applied both imagination and blunt force to getting Las Vegans to use less water.
But Mulroy is the first to admit she’s never quite done learning about people’s relationship to their water. It was 2003, and the drought that is now a decade old was just beginning to settle in, the surface of Lake Mead had fallen sixty feet in just three years, and Mulroy decided it was time to tackle the small but symbolically wasteful fountains spraying across the Las Vegas Valley—the ones in office building lobbies and bank parking lots and shopping center plazas.
“This is funny,” says Mulroy. “We got into an aggressive campaign to limit fountain use. What we really tried to do was separate out the economic value of fountains from the purely decorative use of fountains. The Bellagio fountain versus a little fountain at a shopping center.”
This is one of those topics that Mulroy warms to. She is as fierce, intelligent, and independent as if she were a descendant of a pioneering Nevada ranching family; in fact, she is the daughter of an American father stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Germany and a German mother. Mulroy is both the conjurer of Las Vegas’s water and its protector; she’s as aware of the fountains, lagoons, and canals watering the Strip as she is of her own breath.
“You start turning those water features off, and it will have an effect on visitors. You might be able to turn off that pathetic little fire hose in front of [the casino] New York New York, but you turn around and you dry up the canals in the Venetian, and you watch occupancy drop. How do you discern what’s a good water feature from a bad water feature?”10
For Mulroy, the difference isn’t aesthetic, it’s economic: The water on the Strip is part of the allure of the place—an allure that is magnified precisely by the astonishment of having so much free-flowing water in the middle of the desert—whereas the fountains installed across the civilian part of Las Vegas are just the water equivalent of Muzak.
“It’s perfectly natural to say less people will come visit the city if that fountain at the Bellagio is not here,” says Mulroy. “But I will still go to the grocery store without a fountain. I will still go to the dentist without a babbling brook in the lobby.”
Las Vegans did not agree.
“The banks went absolutely crazy about us telling them to take out their fountains,” she says. “I got the poop beat out of me. A psychologist called me up one morning. He said his patients needed the sound of the babbling brook to do their therapy.
“Really? Really?” Mulroy, a woman with a penetrating gaze, rolls her eyes. “I sent him a CD with the sounds of running water.”
Then Mulroy backed down, kind of.”
“We said, okay, you can keep your fountains—if you take out enough grass to save fifty times the amount of water the fountain uses.” When it comes to Mulroy and Las Vegas’s water, that counts as a compromise. Which is to say, the bankers and therapists and building superintendents might have walked away with their fountains, but Mulroy walked away not just with victory, but a victory fifty times greater than before she started to compromise.
Still, if the silly babbling fountain at the supermarket and the doctor’s office sends the wrong message, don’t the waterfalls of Mandalay Bay and the fountain at the Bellagio send exactly the same wrong message—on a grand scale?
Mulroy narrows her eyes. “People don’t understand water,” she says. Mulroy is working on that.
Las Vegas is a very different place than it was when she reluctantly took over as the general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water Authority (LVVWA) in September 1989. That year, Las Vegas residents used 348 gallons of water per person, each day. Twenty years later, in 2009, Las Vegas residents used just 240 gallons per person, per day. Under Mulroy, per capita water use in the desert metropolis has dropped 31 percent.11
Even more amazing, total water use in 2009 for the whole metropolitan area was almost exactly what it was in 1999. Las Vegas and its suburbs grew by 685,000 people—Las Vegas grew by 50 percent—without having to use any more water. Mind you, there were some big years in between 1999 and 2009—all-time water use peaked in 2006—but that’s the kind of water performance that literally makes Las Vegas’s continued growth possible. It’s the kind of water performance that has made Mulroy the best-known water manager in the country, and perhaps in the world. Water managers in Australia and India mention her admiringly without prompting.
Lots of people get credit for creating Las Vegas—Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Howard Hughes, and in the modern era of moguls, Steve Wynn, who has built five signature Strip megaresorts—the Mirage, Treasure Island, the Bellagio, Wynn, and Encore. But without water, there would be nothing like the Las Vegas we know, and so in very real terms, Patricia Mulroy invented modern Las Vegas, or as she would put it, she allowed modern Las Vegas to invent itself.
The woman who has had such an impact on Las Vegas is in both the city and the job she has by accident. Mulroy’s dad was a civilian personnel manager for the air force stationed mostly in Germany, and although the family lived briefly in the States, Mulroy did all of high school and three years of college in Munich. She wanted to finish school in the United States and got a full scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “I had to go to a map to see where Las Vegas was,” she says. She spent her first night in Vegas in the old Desert Rose hotel, where New York New York is now.
When she finished, she was admitted to a graduate program in German literature at Stanford, but family finances dictated that she get a job. She stayed in Vegas, and started in 1978 as an administrative assistant working for Clark County—the county that surrounds Las Vegas and includes the Strip. Before long she was on the county’s lobbying team, working lawmakers during the legislative session in Carson City. She eventually moved on to a job in the county courthouse. But when the deputy general manager job opened at the Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVVWD)—second in command, in charge of engineering, operations, and administration—Mulroy grabbed it.
“It was just an escape,” Mulroy says now. “I had decided that I would rather slit my wrists than work for judges.” The water department she joined in 1985, she says, “was a standard, traditional water utility: Our No. 1 job was to remain invisible. We had a very parental attitude. We knew better than anybody.”
In those days, the Las Vegas metro area had seven separate water utilities, and a “use it or lose it” division of the available water, in which every municipality needed to use up its allocation of water every year or run the risk of having the allocation reduced. “There was every disincentive to conservation,” says Mulroy. There was also rivalry and competition.
When her boss—the general manager of Las Vegas water—became a victim of local water wars, Mulroy wasn’t inclined to try to replace him. “I didn’t want the job,” she says. “I lacked self-confidence. I was the mother of two small children, a three-year-old and a two-year-old. It took some talking.” The accidental Las Vegas resident became the reluctant water boss nevertheless, in September 1989, at age thirty-six.
Her hesitation was justified. “When I took over in 1989,” says Mulroy, “water was organized chaos. The house of cards was caving in.”
In 1990, any resort installing a waterfall or fountain as often as not used municipal water to feed it, straight from Lake Mead. Golf courses used city water too. Real estate developers were building subdivisions with artificial lakes and filling their fake lakes with water from Lake Mead. Residents and businesses watered their lawns with a casual profligacy that was described in a New York Times story from a year after Mulroy took over. “Sprinklers send small rivers of water into the gutters daily all over Las Vegas,” wrote Robert Reinhold. “Acres of grass surround the new Citicorp Nevada building, a credit-card processing operation, on West Sahara Avenue. Huge sprinklers spray water during hot daylight hours into the air and, on a recent windy day, thousands of gallons drained into the streets.”12
If Mulroy was originally reluctant to take on the general manager’s job, there was nothing tentative about her command of it from the very start. In her first year she did three things that revealed her style and her agenda. Pat Mulroy would not talk or act like previous water managers—she wasn’t going to ask permission to do what was necessary to keep the water flowing, she wasn’t going to let a little whining cause her to second-guess her judgment. And Las Vegans were going to start changing how they used water, because Pat Mulroy was going to show them they had no choice.
In her first few months in the job, she moved to raise water rates—reducing the monthly fixed charge but increasing the rates based on volume, including the highest-volume residential customers, those using 30,000 or 40,000 gallons of water a month watering lawns. It was the opening salvo in an effort to change the attitude about the availability of water, the use of water, and the cost of water. One home builder told Mulroy that big water users in the desert should pay less—that they should get a “volume discount.”13
Mulroy had done the math on Las Vegas’s water use, on the Lake Mead allocation, on the galloping population growth, and she knew that the predictions on which the water department was relying had become scarily, ridiculously optimistic—and out-of-date. In 1990, Las Vegas’s population was 750,000, and it was predicted to reach 1 million ten years later. In fact, the population reached 1 million in 1995. By 2000 it was 1.4 million.
“When I came to work here, our attitude was, ‘Just shut up and turn on the faucet.’ That was a huge mistake,” she says. “We were all going to run out of water in 1995.”
Nevada has an unusual system of water rights. Groundwater is not exclusively connected to the land under which it is found. Groundwater that isn’t being used is controlled by the state, and can be claimed and used by anyone who can make “beneficial use” of it. With just months in charge, Mulroy had the staff of the LVVWD scour nearby counties for unclaimed groundwater rights, and file 146 applications in the state capital for unused water rights in four counties.
At the time, the water Vegas was laying claim to was estimated to total a stunning 865,000 acre-feet—almost three times what Las Vegas was entitled to from Lake Mead. The plan was to secure permission to use the water, and then, over twenty years, dig wells and build a big underground pipeline to bring the water three hundred miles south. When rural ranch owners, county officials, and conservationists learned of the water applications, there was an explosion of anger and opposition.
Rural residents feared that as Las Vegas’s new wells sucked away the groundwater, natural springs would dry up, and their communities would be turned into miniature dust bowls. What was for Mulroy a savvy—and totally legal—strategy for securing new water for her thirsty city looked to the rural counties like water theft. “The development of rural Nevada is dead now because of Las Vegas,” said one county commissioner at the time.
Retorted Mulroy: “If [Las Vegas] dies, Nevada dies.”14
That effort to find new water, in the first year of Mulroy’s tenure, is still being fought. In June 2010, the Nevada Supreme Court allowed Las Vegas’s twenty-one-year effort to gain access to the groundwater to move forward, although the court ruling hardly guaranteed success.
Just by filing the applications for the water, Mulroy helped do something that has turned out to be both pioneering and essential—it gave her the credibility and the muscle to unify the seven wrangling Las Vegas–area water utilities. In the second year of her tenure, they created a new entity, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), which is now the regional water power. The SNWA is the area’s water wholesaler, in charge of securing enough water for the region, as well as planning for and managing the region’s water supply. SNWA’s customers are the water utilities themselves, who are now retailers, supplying water to homes, apartments, businesses, and hotels.
And the head of the new regional water power? Patricia Mulroy. She runs both the SNWA and the Las Vegas Valley Water District. That early, lightning-strike filing for the unused groundwater north of Las Vegas gave Mulroy’s colleagues a taste of her ability to look ahead—in terms of demand for water, in terms of finding supply, and in terms of fearless political strategy.
The final thing Mulroy did that first year was sit down with Steve Wynn, the man who created the model for the modern Vegas casino—big, luxurious, themed like a cruise ship or a resort, and drenched in water. Wynn’s Mirage hotel, with its lagoon, waterfalls, and volcano, opened just as Mulroy got the water chief’s job. In her first few months, he was working on his second casino, Treasure Island, where he wanted to feature a nightly “battle” between pirate ships in a lagoon.
In early 1990, Wynn summoned Mulroy. The water district was getting ready to regulate—or even disallow—huge water features that relied on drinking water for their supply.
“I was asked to come to the Mirage,” says Mulroy, “and we talked for two hours.” It was a blunt conversation, from both sides.
“Steve Wynn was the first to say to me, ‘People don’t come to the desert. They come to the oasis in the desert. Who escapes to rocks?’
“And he’s right about that. Las Vegas sells virtual reality. We’re creating virtual realities that are no different than Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World. And when it’s 118 degrees outside, water becomes an integral part of that.”
For her part, Mulroy knew already that Las Vegas had to change the way it approached water—that you couldn’t use millions of gallons of purified drinking water, from your limited stock of Lake Mead water, to stage mock pirate-ship battles in an artificial lake every night.
“What Wynn said to me was, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t have fountains and water features. Tell me what I can do to do it.’”
So she told him: Use recycled water in Treasure Island—use purified wastewater for the fountains and lagoons. “He double-plumbed Treasure Island,” says Mulroy, “and he put a water treatment plant in the basement.”
It was another moment when a potential Mulroy adversary walked away with apparent victory. Steve Wynn went from wondering who this woman was who was going to ban his lagoons and fountains, to opening a hotel that did, for its first decade, stage nightly pirate battles. Mulroy, though, walked away with her own victory. First, she had won an ally. And second, she set the precedent that has become the water law of the Strip, the secret of its splashy, extravagant water features. Developers must either use wells from their own property, the rights and permits for which date back before the modern era, or they must use treated wastewater, or they must offset their water features with bigger water savings elsewhere, like the banks and shopping centers.
That, at least in part, is how you get both water ostentation and water conservation.
AS YOU STEP ONTO THE INDUSTRIAL FLOOR of Mission Industries Plant 50 in North Las Vegas, the thing that strikes you first is the smell: the aroma of freshly laundered hotel towels, thick, soft, and inviting.
For a lot of the hotels on the Strip, this is where that smell, and those crisply creased pillowcases and fluffy bath towels, come from. Las Vegas is a place of fantasy, but someone has to wash the dirty sheets. Mission Industries handles the laundry for more than half the Strip resorts—sending out fleets of trucks each day to collect bins of dirty linen, and then re-delivering carts piled with perfectly pressed and stacked linens to every level of hotel—from those charging $49 a night to four- and five-star resorts like Mandalay Bay and the Bellagio.
Mission Industries Plant 50 is really a single laundry room the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter, with a twenty-five-foot-high ceiling, lines of industrial washers, dryers, and high-speed ironing and folding machines, and at the loading dock, carts of dirty linen lined up twenty deep waiting to be emptied. It’s clear why the big Strip resorts outsource this task to specialty houses. Laundry at this level is an art in itself. Before the economic downturn, Plant 50 was running twenty-two hours a day, seven days a week. The process starts with a sort—to pluck out the teddy bears, underwear, and miniature shampoo bottles that end up in the piles of towels and sheets. Anything that’s not getting laundered goes into the garbage.
The four washing machines, each longer than a school bus, look like comically elongated Laundromat washers, and are called tunnel washers. Loads of sheets and towels move from front to back in a series of chambers, washed in 150-degree water.
The machines that do the finish-work on queen- and king-size sheets look like huge printing presses—wet sheets get fed in at one end of a fifty-foot-long line of machinery; dry, wrinkle-free, razor-edge piles of folded sheets emerge at the other end, all moving almost too quickly for the eye to follow. Sensors on the folding line scan the sheets for stains and pluck out any that need rewashing.
Plant 50 is one of the largest laundry facilities in Las Vegas. When the Strip hotels are well booked, it does 3.5 million pounds of sheets and towels a week, linens from twenty thousand rooms a day. All that washing requires a lot of water. Plant 50 is a “light soil” facility—cleaning sheets and towels involves nothing like cleaning the stains and grease in restaurant linens, which go to the “heavy soil” plant. Even so, Plant 50 uses nearly a million gallons of Lake Mead water a day.
Or it did, until Ralph Barbosa convinced his bosses to install a water reuse system. It was a test to see if Mission could clean its own dirty wash water on-site and send it back into the washing machines for a second run, saving both water and money. Barbosa, who is director of engineering for Mission, has worked for the company since May 1973. “It was my idea,” he says. “It took me a year and a half to talk the owner into it.
“You know, the lake is about 120 feet below its usual level—there’s a lot of white rock showing. It’s really a sight that is shocking. I think we can have an impact.”
Barbosa spent months talking to equipment companies, looking for the right water recycling system at the right price. “We used anywhere from 2 to 2.5 gallons of water per pound of laundry. We were shooting for 1.5 to 2 gallons instead.”
According to Barbosa, the typical room in a Strip resort produces twenty-two pounds of dirty sheets and towels a day—requiring 44 gallons of wash water. Mission’s water and sewer bill is $9 for every 1,000 gallons—to save $1,000, Barbosa had to reduce water use by 110,000 gallons, about what a family uses in a year.
The system Mission ended up installing, in May 2007, is an elaborate array of filtration and disinfection steps that amounts to a small water treatment plant. Sitting outside next to Plant 50’s water storage tanks, the system looks like a miniature oil refinery: Water drained from the tunnel washers—which isn’t very dirty, whatever is washed off the sheets and towels, mostly hair and lint—goes through a series of five increasingly fine filters. The water is disinfected twice, with ozone and with UV light. Then the water is ready to do its washing again.
The system cost about $800,000 to buy and install. In its first year of use, it saved Mission 240,000 gallons of water a day—$2,000 off the water bill each day. And, Barbosa says, there was a surprise or two.
The recycled water helped cut the amount of time thick towels needed to dry in the big, natural-gas-fired dryers. How can reusing wash water cut drying time?
Mission’s recycled water stays very hot—it comes out of the treatment process almost as hot as when it comes out of the washers, about 130 degrees. Reusing such hot water reduces the cost of heating the wash water up to 150 degrees in the first place, of course. But Mission also uses that 130-degree recycled water in the rinse cycle of the tunnel washers. The rinse water used to be only 95 degrees. The towels emerge from the washers hotter now.
“The hotter rinse water opens the pores of the terry cloth,” says Barbosa, “so the towels dry faster.” Hotter towels literally release their moisture faster. “It saves us three or four minutes on the drying cycle for the towels, out of a typical drying time of twenty-two minutes.”
So Mission saves money on its water bill, on its water-heating bill, and also on its natural gas bill. It’s exactly the kind of unexpected, cascading benefit people often discover when they start managing their water use more closely. Much of the cost of using water in the first place isn’t in the water itself but in what you do to the water in order to use it, and when you reuse the water, you often retain things, like heat or cold, that you paid to put into the water.
Mission’s recycling system has paid for itself in a little more than a year, and Mission was impressed enough that before the recession hit, the company installed a second system at another of its four Las Vegas laundry plants. The recycled water, in fact, has helped Mission weather the downturn by reducing routine operating costs: The cost of the water to wash one room’s linens has gone from 40 cents to 30 cents.
When the Strip hotels are generating a typical load of linens, the two systems save Mission 360,000 gallons of drinking water a day—a little more than 1 acre-foot. Which is to say, Mission’s water reuse systems will save not just Mission, but Las Vegas, 400 acre-feet of Lake Mead water a year, out of the 300,000 the city is allowed—permanently. One company’s savings is everyone’s savings, because when a Las Vegas water customer reduces water use, it frees the water for someone else.
Barbosa says that the recession, which for a while cut laundry loads in half, put on hold plans to install the water recycling systems at Mission’s other plants, but that when business picks back up, there’s no reason not to install two more.
“It’s going to be huge, this kind of thing,” says Barbosa. “It’s going to take off.”
In the occasionally counterintuitive world of cutting-edge water management, no one was happier to see Mission Industries reduce its water use than the woman who gets Mission its water, Pat Mulroy. As part of its conservation efforts, the SNWA gave Mission a check for $150,000 to help pay for the recycling system—about 20 percent of the cost—after Mission showed how much water it wasn’t using.
“At the moment,” says Barbosa, “the bean counters are ecstatic.”15
THE WATER USED TO CLEAN HOTEL LINENS in Las Vegas is trivial compared with the much more visible water required to keep Las Vegas’s golf courses green. Laying down a carpet of turf, and keeping it alive, on the red rock of the Mojave Desert doesn’t require watering, it requires irrigation, and obsessive irrigation at that. The average high temperature in Las Vegas in June is 99°F, in July it’s 104, in August it’s 102. For a quarter of the year, the temperature is 99 or more every single day.
Angel Park is a popular course in Las Vegas, open to the public, with thirty-six holes designed by golf legend Arnold Palmer, and a smaller twelve-hole course lit for nighttime play. By the time a golfer steps up to the first tee, Angel Park has used 2,507 gallons of water to make that round of golf possible, 139 gallons of water for each hole of an eighteen-hole round, for each golfer, each day. A foursome of Angel Park golfers playing eighteen holes requires enough water to supply the needs of a typical U.S. family for a month.16
That 2,507 gallons of water isn’t “virtual” water—on midsummer nights, Angel Park’s sprinkler system can spray 2 million gallons of water onto the course.
And that’s all good news: Angel Park, under superintendent Bill Rohret, has been among Las Vegas’s most aggressive courses at finding ways to use water more carefully. “We’ve taken ourselves off the potable water grid,” says Rohret, on a walking tour of Angel Park on a morning in May. “Everything you see in terms of water use is reclaimed water. It’s tertiary treatment, clean enough that you could bathe in it.”
In its early years, Angel Park used much more water than it uses today—in 1996, the course used 644 million gallons of water, enough for a city of ten thousand people—and all the water it used was drinking water, straight from the Lake Mead allocation. Since 2001, Angel Park has irrigated exclusively with recycled wastewater. Rohret is using four times the recycled water that Mission Industries uses, and the golf course is buying it from a Las Vegas city sewage treatment plant. The 1 million gallons of water the sprinklers have put on the course this May day, says Rohret, “was in someone’s house twenty-four hours ago.”
More dramatically, Rohret and Angel Park have changed the nature and texture of the course. Since 2007, the club has taken out 76 acres from the course’s original 260 acres of turf, removing almost the equivalent of a whole golf course’s worth of grass, and replaced it with sophisticated desert xeriscaping. In some places, like the islands in the parking lot, removing grass had no impact on golfers. In other places, like the fourth hole of Angel Park’s Mountain course, the patches of stark, arid landscape in the midst of golf holes take some getting used to. The shot from the tee to the green now crosses a shallow desert canyon, an arroyo, where there had previously been a “water feature,” a lake holding millions of gallons of water. The patches of desert look as out of place in the midst of a lush golf course as the golf course itself looks out of place in the desert.
“It’s a new kind of golf course,” says Rohret, who has lived in Las Vegas since 1987. “It’s funny, twenty years ago when we opened, we took out the desert to put the grass in. Now we’re taking grass out to put the desert back in.”
Angel Park has a computer-controlled irrigation system linked to weather sensors, and like most golf courses, it has the equipment, the knowledge, and the staff to keep the course immaculate using 36 percent less water per acre than a typical Vegas homeowner.17 Every shrub, plant, and tree has its own individual sprinkler head—the turf emitters, spraying wide areas of grass, run at 30 gallons per minute; the drip irrigation heads run at about 1 gallon an hour. Replacing seventy-six acres of grass with rocks, gravel, and desert plants, says Rohret, he hoped to save 80 million gallons of water a year. “Last year, we were down 120 million gallons, way more than I dreamed.” That takes $280,000 off Angel Park’s water bill (Angel Park pays $2.33 per thousand gallons of recycled water).
And taking out 30 percent of the grass to save water has had other benefits—just as Mission Industries discovered. “That’s eighty acres of turf we don’t have to mow,” says Rohret, “at $3 a gallon for fuel. It’s eighty acres we don’t have to seed. It’s eighty acres we don’t have to fertilize.” He’s buying 120,000 pounds of grass seed a year, down from 160,000 pounds, and the fertilizer budget is down 20 percent. Rohret took out a thousand of the course’s seven thousand sprinkler heads, and has saved on the replacement costs for them. “The coyotes and the rabbits eat the emitters,” says Rohret.
Relandscaping an Arnold Palmer–designed golf course is not like replacing a patch of lawn at home—it requires planning, design, materials, work, and heavy equipment. The SNWA has an incentive program to encourage homeowners and businesses to take out turf. Nicknamed “cash for grass,” it pays between $1 and $1.50 for every square foot of grass removed and replaced with desert landscaping—whether the grass is in the front yard of a blackjack dealer’s subdivision house or on a golf course. That comes to about $45,000 an acre. For a course like Angel Park, where the desertification program cost almost $3 million, the SNWA’s turf-removal program essentially covered the cost of reconstruction. And Angel Park plans to xeriscape another twelve acres of turf.
Rohret loves Angel Park’s new personality. “It looks like a desert,” he says. “There’s no need to have all this turf. The mind-set has changed—the old course is like a dinosaur.”
The water features of the casinos on the Strip are splashy and ostentatious, but the real indulgence in Las Vegas are the sixty-one golf courses. Orlando, Florida, with a third more visitors than Las Vegas and the same number of residents, and which gets a foot of rain for every inch Las Vegas gets, has just twenty-one golf courses.18
Angel Park, which is home to two full-size golf courses, uses 376 million gallons of water a year. The Fountains of Bellagio, which need 22 million gallons to fill and operate, only require 12 million gallons of water each year to replace water lost to leaks, wind, and evaporation. So one golf club, of Las Vegas’s forty-five, uses more water in twelve days than the Fountains of Bellagio use in a year.
The SNWA now rigidly regulates the water golf courses can use—every golf course has a mandated water budget. The water budgets have not only reduced the amount of water courses use but also reduced the creation of new courses. Still, to grow grass on Las Vegas’s hardpack, golf courses are using the same amount of water that farmers in the Imperial Valley of California use to grow lettuce and wheat, carrots, broccoli, and onions, in one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country—and the Imperial Valley farmers, in fact, are using the very same water, Lake Mead water delivered by canal to California.19
Growing grass in Las Vegas isn’t just an indulgence, it’s the biggest problem. According to the SNWA, 70 percent of the water Las Vegans use at home is used outdoors, mostly for lawn and garden watering, but also to wash cars and fill swimming pools. In most of America, of course, we don’t use 70 percent of our home water for outside consumption. It is one of the ironies that in popular suburban desert communities like Las Vegas and Henderson, and Phoenix, and Scottsdale, and Tucson, homeowners feel the need to use so much more water on their landscaping in precisely the places where that water is less available. Because homeowners account for almost half the total water use in Las Vegas, the outdoor use means literally 31 percent of the water the city takes from Lake Mead ends up lost to the arid landscape and the desert air.20
That’s why Mulroy has been so focused on paying people to take out grass. “You know, every time it snows in Buffalo, people pack and move to Phoenix and Las Vegas,” she says. “They come here and they think they can bring their Kentucky bluegrass and their magnolias with them. They want the benefits of no precipitation, and the things they were used to, too.”
Or as Steve Wynn put it so crisply, people don’t come to the desert, they come to the oasis in the desert.
Mulroy’s “cash for grass” program has paid out $155 million to Las Vegas residents—almost $80 per person—and Mulroy likes to put the turf removed in terms of square feet: 140 million square feet of grass removed. While that sounds dramatic, it’s not huge: 3,214 acres. That’s the equivalent of just 13,000 homeowners each taking out a quarter-acre of turf in a town with 400,000 homeowners.
Of course, it’s not so much the grass removed as the water saved that matters. The SNWA concluded that every square foot of grass removed saves 55 gallons of lawn watering, every year, forever. So the SNWA says the turf Mulroy has paid to take out is saving Las Vegas 7.7 billion gallons of water a year—8 percent of the Lake Mead allocation, hardly trivial.
The real cultural change that Mulroy and her colleagues have pulled off, though, has been much more dramatic than paying people to give up their grass. Mulroy, the transplant from Germany, is trying to teach Las Vegans to live in the desert, and to act like they live in a desert.
Driven by the drought, the SNWA has imposed a whole series of water-saving rules—the kinds of things that make sense in a desert city, but that would have been unthinkable when Pat Mulroy took her job, and that would astonish Americans in any other community. And though inspired by the drought, the rules aren’t temporary, they are permanent.
Some seem relatively small. In order to wash your car in your driveway, you have to use a nozzle with one of those spring-loaded automated shutoffs. No running hoses allowed.
Every residence in Las Vegas is assigned mandatory watering days. In the spring and fall, you can only water three days a week. In the winter, outdoor watering is limited to a single day a week. In the brutally hot summer months, watering is allowed every day, but never between the hours of 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.
In a nod to Mulroy’s skepticism about little fountains in shopping centers and office parks, new outdoor water features at commercial establishments are forbidden (except for resorts following offset rules, or businesses with their own well water and permits to use it).
Most dramatically, in all of metropolitan Las Vegas, newly built homes are forbidden to have front lawns. Only half the backyard of a new home can be planted in grass. New commercial developments are forbidden to have turf at all.
The scenes from the 1990s, of sprinkler systems sending wide arcs of water across the green lawns of office parks, spilling the excess into the scorching gutters—those days are simply over. In fact, it’s not only illegal to water your lawn when it’s not your day, or at 1 p.m., or to have a front lawn at a new house, it’s illegal to let water from a misaimed (or broken) sprinkler run down your driveway into the street or spray onto the sidewalk. And the local water utilities have water cops who patrol the city’s streets, looking for water waste and writing violations.
Perhaps the most surprising, and least well-known, element of Las Vegas’s water system is that at this point, it’s only the outdoor water that really matters at all. Las Vegas reuses or recycles almost every gallon of water that is used indoors in any context. Any water anywhere in the metropolitan region that goes down a drain—water from car washes, water from dishwashers, from showers and mop buckets, from elementary school water fountains and hot tubs and toilets—ends up treated and reused at a golf course or a park, or it ends up cleaned and sent directly back to Lake Mead.
More than 90 percent of the water used indoors is captured and recycled. That, in fact, is the only way that Las Vegas survives.
The city first broke through the federal ceiling of the 300,000 acre-feet of water a year it is allowed back in 1992—that year, Las Vegas took 306,000 acre-feet. But that same year, the city returned 128,000 acre-feet of treated wastewater back to Lake Mead, so in fact it had only “used” 178,000 acre-feet.
For each of the last ten years, Las Vegas has taken more than 450,000 acre-feet of water, but these days it returns about 210,000, keeping it under the cap. Overall, Las Vegas is sending directly back to its source of water about 40 percent of the water it takes.21 (Lake Mead itself helps keep Las Vegas’s water use in perspective. Every day, twice as much water evaporates from the surface of the lake as Las Vegas uses total.)
For Las Vegas, the absolute inviolability of the return-flow credits is crucial. For every gallon of water Las Vegas is able to collect, clean, and return to the lake, it gets to take a new gallon of water to use.
As a result, getting water back into the sewers is a bit of an obsession in Las Vegas, because water that goes into the sewers is water that can, ultimately, be taken back out of Lake Mead. The SNWA’s Web site, for instance, gives detailed instructions for how to empty your backyard swimming pool, not into the gutter but into the sanitary sewer. It is illegal in Las Vegas to drain your pool or hot tub into the street or the storm drains.22
And that’s why the SNWA is so focused on managing outdoor water use, and slowly laying the groundwork for a community where the habits of outdoor use are permanently reduced by laws, by practice, by the very landscape that people get used to seeing every day.
It’s just one more oddity of Las Vegas that, in fact, it doesn’t really matter how long your shower is, whether you are a resident or luxuriating in your suite at the Bellagio. The shower water is all going right back to Lake Mead.
But the irony cuts both ways. Although it’s great that Angel Park and other golf courses now use treated sewage to stay green, it’s not nearly as great as it first seems. That water has been used once, to be sure, for showers or laundry or flushing the toilet. It is cleaned, and pumped to the golf course for reuse as irrigation water. But in a back-channel way, the golf course water still comes right out of Las Vegas’s drinking water.
If the wastewater treatment plant weren’t pumping the water to a golf course, it would be sending it back into Lake Mead, and Las Vegas would be getting water credits for it. Once it’s sprinkled onto a green, at least in terms of Pat Mulroy’s water ledgers, it’s water that’s gone for good. The golf course reuse water only gets used twice—once in someone’s home or business, and once to water the golf course. That’s why it still urgently matters not just where golf courses get their water but how much they use. A typical toilet flush in Las Vegas, on the other hand, can be repeated hundreds of times—really, infinitely—and the very act of flushing the toilet regenerates the water necessary to refill it.
AS LAS VEGAS WAS WATCHING ITS RESERVOIR EVAPORATE, all the way across the country, another energetic, sprawling American city was having exactly the same experience. In February 2008, in the midst of the worst drought in Atlanta’s history, Lake Lanier, the city’s drinking water reservoir, was just two feet from the lowest it had been since being filled in 1958.23 With the Atlanta metro region scrambling to figure out how to survive another dry spring and summer, the Georgia state legislature took bold action.
Citing a flawed land survey from 1818, both the Georgia House and the Georgia Senate voted to move their state’s border with Tennessee 1.1 miles north. That would put Georgia’s northwest corner in the middle of the Tennessee River, and entitle Georgia to a slice of that big river’s water, magically solving Atlanta’s water shortage. The Senate vote, to establish a commission to redraw the boundary—states can’t, of course, unilaterally change their boundaries—was unanimous; the bill was signed by Governor Sonny Perdue. As Republican senator Dick Shafer, the bill’s sponsor, rose to speak before the Senate vote, his fellow senators sang, “This Land Is Your Land.”
The mayor of Chattanooga, the big Tennessee city that sits on the border with Georgia, and through which the Tennessee River runs, responded by dispatching an aide to the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta with a truckload of two thousand bottles of water to ease Georgia’s thirst. “Today they come for our river,” the Chattanooga mayor said. “Tomorrow they might come for our Jack Daniel’s.”
Tennessee state representative Gerald McCormick was less amused. Of his Georgia legislative colleagues, he said, “They’re idiots.”24
As easy as it is to shake your head at Las Vegas’s attitudes about water, Las Vegans themselves have spent the last twenty years taking their relationship to their water supply seriously in a way that almost no one else in the United States has. They may be in trouble, but it’s not because they don’t realize how precarious their supply of water is.
What’s really remarkable is that a community like Atlanta, which sits in an area of water wealth and prides itself on its sense of civic-mindedness, has water troubles at least as urgent as those in Las Vegas. And where Las Vegas’s challenges come mostly from the struggle to sustain a metropolis in a desert, Atlanta’s troubles spring from a much more universal problem: water complacency.
Atlanta is now a metropolitan area of 5.5 million people. In each of the last two decades, it has added more people than any other metro area in the United States—in sheer numbers, it has for twenty years been the fastest-growing place in America. Just from 2000 to 2009, the city added 136,000 people each year. That’s nearly 400 new residents every single day.
Las Vegas has grown mind-bogglingly quickly any way you measure it. But here’s how dramatically Atlanta has grown: Since 1990, the equivalent of everyone in Las Vegas has picked up and moved to Atlanta. The city has added 2.4 million residents since 1990.25
And how much new water has Atlanta added for those people?
Not a drop.
Odd as it may seem to compare the positively lush geography of Atlanta with the desert landscape of Las Vegas, in some important ways involving water, Atlanta is very much like Las Vegas.
Atlanta, too, gets most of its water—75 percent—from a single source, Lake Lanier, a reservoir created by a dam, just like Lake Mead.
Lake Lanier, like Lake Mead, is managed by the federal government, and its water is committed to a wide variety of uses, from keeping a nuclear power plant in Alabama running to keeping alive a threatened species of mussel called the purple bankclimber, which lives down in the Florida Panhandle.26
So Atlanta, like Las Vegas, doesn’t control its main source of water, or even control how much water it can have from its main source of water.
The differences between Atlanta and Las Vegas, in water terms, are equally important, but they have nothing to do with climate, or even with water. The real difference between Atlanta and Las Vegas is attitude.
There is no water czar—no Patricia Mulroy—in the Atlanta metro region. Indeed, there is no real water leadership. The Atlanta metro region includes 28 counties, 140 municipalities, and 52 separate water utilities.27 Going back fifty years, water planning and water management in the area have consisted mostly of wishful thinking, rain dances, and litigation.
Atlanta sits on the Chattahoochee River, which begins in the Blue Ridge foothills a hundred miles northeast of the city, winds through Atlanta’s western suburbs, and then flows south, forming the border between Georgia and Alabama and slicing through the Florida Panhandle, where it becomes the Apalachicola River and flushes into Apalachicola Bay.
The Chattahoochee’s reassuring presence—along with an average of 50 inches of rain a year, ten times what Las Vegas gets—has always made Atlanta rather blithe about its water supply. Atlanta takes 500 million gallons a day from Lanier (more than Las Vegas uses total), and 3 million Atlanta area residents rely on it.28
Back in 1948, when Congress was getting ready to build Lake Lanier, it asked Atlanta to contribute to the construction cost, which would have secured the city permanent drinking water rights to the reservoir. Mayor William B. Hartsfield, a legendary figure after whom Atlanta’s airport was named, wrote back rejecting the idea of helping to pay for the dam and reservoir. “In our case the benefit so far as water supply is only incidental and in case of a prolonged drought. The City of Atlanta has many sources of potential water supply in north Georgia. Certainly a city which is only one hundred miles below one of the greatest rainfall areas in the nation will never find itself in the position of a city like Los Angeles.”29
Fifty years later, when that prolonged drought drained Lake Lanier almost to the point of disaster, Georgia officials were simultaneously imperious and baffled at their lack of leverage. With the lake’s level dropping a foot a week in November 2007, Atlanta area officials couldn’t understand why Lanier’s federal managers were releasing 1.5 billion gallons a day of water through the dam, into the downstream channel of the Chattahoochee, and on to the Apalachicola. Each day, the feds were literally flushing away three times the water Atlanta needed.
The Chattahoochee and Apalachicola wind for 542 miles, and Atlanta often seems to behave as if the water sent downstream is a gift. In fact, the Army Corps of Engineers is legally required to maintain certain flows of water down the river in part to support the habitat in Florida for three endangered species—the purple bankclimber mussel, the fat three-ridge mussel, and the gulf sturgeon.
As Lanier’s condition became perilous, Georgia’s congressional delegation introduced legislation to suspend the federal Endangered Species Act. “This legislation will help to ensure that the Endangered Species Act doesn’t turn the people of Georgia … into an endangered species themselves,” said Representative Phil Gingrey.30
In fact, over the river system’s four hundred miles below Atlanta, seven cities and counties—with 130,000 residents—along with nine power plants and five factories, all take their water from the flow of the Chattahoochee and the Apalachicola. And the river ultimately empties into a Florida bay that produces 10 percent of the U.S. mussel harvest each year.31
“Atlanta has based its growth on the idea that it could take whatever water it wanted whenever it wanted it, and that the downstream states would simply have to do with less,” said Alabama governor Bob Riley. “They should not be able to shut off the water coming into a state.”32
Remarkably, during the congressional hearings in 1952 about approving construction of Lanier, with Atlanta having opted out of helping foot the bill, a young congressman from Michigan named Gerald Ford precisely foresaw what would eventually happen, even though Atlanta was then smaller than Buffalo or Kansas City. Questioning an official from the Army Corps of Engineers, Ford asked, “Is it not conceivable in the future, though, when this particular project is completed, that the city of Atlanta will make demands on the Corps because of the needs of the community, when at the same time it will be for the best interests of the overall picture … to retain water in the reservoir?”33
Atlanta ultimately skated through the 2007–2008 drought with the help of stringent outdoor watering restrictions, and rain that came in 2008. It was the area’s fourth drought since 1980, and although there was much talk of both conservation and fresh sources of water, once Lake Lanier refilled and the recession took hold, the urgency about water faded.
The backdrop to not just the drought, but to Atlanta’s water future, was a series of federal lawsuits in which Alabama and Florida had challenged the amount of water Atlanta was taking from Lake Lanier. Although Mayor Hartsfield had dismissed the idea that the Atlanta area would come to depend on Lanier, by 1990, Atlanta was using hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day, and the states downstream sued, claiming that Atlanta’s galloping use of Chattahoochee water was impinging on everyone else’s use. Alabama and Florida made a much more dramatic claim, as well. They said Atlanta wasn’t legally entitled to any Lanier water, because when the reservoir was originally constructed, supplying Atlanta with drinking water wasn’t one of its purposes. Atlanta had been offered the chance to drink from the reservoir, and pay a few million dollars for the right, and had specifically declined. Only Congress could give Atlanta water from Lanier, and it would have to pass legislation to do so.
Those lawsuits ground through the federal court system for decades, accompanied by years of side negotiations among the governors of the three states. The lawsuits took so long, in fact, that while they were being litigated, Atlanta’s population grew from 3 million to 5.5 million people. And then in July 2009, just four months after Atlanta’s drought was formally declared over, came a blow that would make the drought seem minor.
U.S. District Court judge Paul Magnuson, in a ruling consolidating and resolving six separate cases involving eighteen litigants, agreed completely with Alabama and Florida. He declared that most of Atlanta’s withdrawals from Lake Lanier, going back thirty years, had in fact been unauthorized and illegal.34
In a meticulous ninety-seven-page decision, Magnuson ordered the Corps to stop providing water to Atlanta, and ordered Atlanta’s use of Chattahoochee water cut back to what had been permitted in 1976. That figure instantly reduced Atlanta’s communities to surviving on sixty-six gallons of water per person per day for all purposes, less than half what they used during the driest period of the drought (and just a quarter what Las Vegans use).35
Magnuson offered a single-paragraph lecture on the water-planning failure of Atlanta and Georgia leaders. Zeroing in on Atlanta’s growth and lack of effort to match it to the available water, Magnuson wrote:
Too often, state, local and even national government actors do not consider the long-term consequences of their decisions. Local governments allow unchecked growth because it increases tax revenue, but these same governments do not sufficiently plan for the resources such unchecked growth will require. Nor do individual citizens consider frequently enough their consumption of our scarce resources, absent a crisis such as that experienced in the [Apalachicola-Chattahoochee] basin in the last few years. The problems faced in the [Apalachicola-Chattahoochee] basin will continue to be repeated throughout this country, as the population grows and more undeveloped land is developed. Only by cooperating, planning, and conserving can we avoid the situations that gave rise to this litigation.36
And Magnuson took a subtle swipe at a certain confidence on the part of Georgia officials that, after twenty years, Atlanta couldn’t possibly lose the court cases—because where would all those innocent people drink from?
“The Court recognizes that this is a draconian result,” wrote Magnuson, but the law doesn’t say, “Changes shall be made only upon the approval of Congress unless it is inconvenient to do so.”37
He did offer Atlanta and Georgia one break. Acknowledging that Atlanta’s communities “cannot suddenly end their reliance on the water,” Magnuson gave Atlanta three years to either get Congress to approve Atlanta’s use of Lanier water or negotiate an agreement with Florida and Alabama to share the water. The three-year clock started ticking the day he issued his decision, July 17, 2009.38
The ruling went off like a bomb in Georgia. Sam Williams, president of the Atlanta Metro Area Chamber of Commerce, said, “It would perhaps have a Katrina-size effect on the metro economy. We’ve got to make sure this gets solved before the ultimate deadline hits us.”39
Georgia governor Perdue, while ordering an appeal, formed a task force to quickly study what Atlanta’s options would be if the appeal failed, and the CEO of Coca-Cola’s largest bottler cochaired the study.
Perdue—aware that Georgia’s congressional delegation was badly outnumbered by the combined delegations of Florida and Alabama—vowed to negotiate a sharing agreement with his fellow governors that would end the dispute once and for all.
And Perdue signed a bill that moved rapidly through the Georgia legislature called the Water Stewardship Act of 2010, which he said would create “a statewide culture of conservation” and was also intended to impress Magnuson with Georgia’s newfound seriousness.
Then something strange happened.
Perdue’s emergency Water Contingency Planning Task Force produced a forty-two-page report. But the task force’s main recommendation is the second sentence of those forty-two pages: “The Task Force evaluation reaffirms that Lake Lanier is by far the best water supply source for the metro region.” One sentence later, the report says, “The Task Force does not foresee the ability of the metro region to meet the potential water shortfall in 2012, when Judge Magnuson’s ruling could take effect, even with extremely aggressive mandated conservation.”
In accepting the report, Governor Perdue said, “Lake Lanier is absolutely our best option.”40
Facing a cutoff of water from Lake Lanier, which would produce “Katrina-like” devastation in Atlanta, the governor of Georgia and his eighty-member task force concluded that, really, the water from Lake Lanier is the best solution to their water problems after all.
As for Perdue’s vow to end the problem by finally getting an agreement with the governors of Alabama and Florida, by the first-year anniversary of Judge Magnuson’s order, there was no agreement and not much prospect for one. Georgia found itself without much negotiating leverage, since both Florida and Alabama had little to lose by using Magnuson’s decision as a starting point for negotiations.41
The governors of all three states were scheduled to leave office in January 2011. There seemed almost no chance that the three would resolve one of the knottiest political problems facing their states in their last year in office. When three new governors take office in January 2011, Magnuson’s thirty-six-month cushion will have been cut to eighteen months.
As for the Water Stewardship Act of 2010, Perdue signed it a year after Magnuson’s ruling, on the shores of Lake Lanier. But by the standards of places that are taking water conservation seriously, Georgia’s law is relatively modest. It does limit outdoor lawn watering across Georgia to the hours of 4 p.m. to 10 a.m., but exempts home vegetable gardens, athletic fields, even golf courses. The bill requires new apartment buildings to have a “sub-meter” for each apartment, not just a single meter for the complex, and further tightens low-flow shower and toilet standards dating back to 1992. The oddest part of the bill, given the effort to impress everyone with Georgia’s new conservation attitude, is that many of its provisions won’t be in force until July 2012, the month Judge Magnuson’s order would take effect.42
Almost incredibly, a year after being delivered a devastating court ruling that could dramatically reduce Atlanta’s access to Lake Lanier, the metro area’s leaders were down to two strategies: to insist that they need water from Lake Lanier, and to appeal the judge’s ruling. They had returned to the water strategy established by Mayor William Hartsfield: wishful thinking.
Governor Perdue’s spokesman, Bert Brantley, summed it up: “I don’t think anybody … believes the ruling will go into effect in 2012.”43
As it happens, the folks in Atlanta and Georgia did at least have the foresight to consult an expert on water scarcity and water sharing: Patricia Mulroy. As the drought in Atlanta was ending, and before Magnuson’s decision, several members of Governor Perdue’s water negotiating team flew out to Las Vegas to consult with her. They went in December 2008, during the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA), so they could hear from officials from Colorado and California too. They wanted to know how Nevada, California, and Colorado successfully shared the Colorado River.
“We met in a suite in Caesars Palace,” says Mulroy. “The people from Georgia were sitting on the couch, it was ‘hear no evil,’ ‘see no evil,’ ‘speak no evil.’ One of the women from Georgia said, ‘We don’t have a water problem. We have an endangered species problem.’
“This is the state’s lead negotiator!
“I lost it,” says Mulroy. “I said, at the end of the day, the Atlanta metropolitan water district has to be able to serve its population with less water. What caused that is irrelevant!”
Mulroy shakes her head exactly the same way she did when talking about the psychotherapist who thought his patients needed the sound of a babbling brook to solve their psychological problems.
“It was hilarious,” she says. But not really very funny.
ALMOST EVERY COMMUNITY in the United States has water problems. The good news is, water problems can be solved, and the sooner we start thinking about them, the less expensive those solutions are. The bad news is, water problems can’t be solved quickly, and when there’s a water crisis, the quick solutions are expensive. Water requires thinking about the future not in sunny, optimistic terms but in frankly realistic terms.
Patricia Mulroy has been unafraid to look at the water future, and she’s been unafraid to try to master it. She is not counting on rain in the Rockies to save Lake Mead. With Las Vegas’s two water intake pipes in danger of being left dry by Lake Mead’s continuing fall, Mulroy pushed to install a third intake, the so-called third straw.
The third straw is an extraordinary effort any way you look at it—in engineering terms, political terms, water terms. The third straw is designed to come up into the bottom of the lake, like a bathtub drain, as opposed to coming in from the side, as Las Vegas’s first two intakes do. Coming in from the bottom means you have access to water almost no matter how low the lake falls; it also means you have a huge engineering problem, which is that you have to dig deep enough beneath the lake bottom, and build your pipe strong enough, to withstand the crushing weight of the water in the largest reservoir in the United States. The Italian company awarded the contract to build the third straw, Impregilo S.A., built the flood-control gates for Venice, and is helping to build a third set of locks for the Panama Canal. Just to go deep enough to start tunneling under Lake Mead, workers had to dig a staging hole six hundred feet down. The single pipe they ultimately install will be twenty feet in diameter, wider across than the fuselage of a Boeing 747, and be capable of supplying three times the amount of water Las Vegas currently uses. The machine that will dig the tunnel for that pipe will be lowered in pieces, six hundred feet into the working pit, and assembled in place.44
Mulroy is worried enough about the rate at which Lake Mead has fallen that work on the third straw goes on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Lake Mead would only have to fall thirty-eight feet—that’s two or three really dry years—for Intake 1 to become useless, leaving Las Vegas utterly dependent on Intake 2, which is another fifty feet down.
In an illustration of the speed with which water problems seem to be accelerating, the water staff in Las Vegas first started talking about the third straw in 2002, as Lake Mead’s level started to drop. That year, Las Vegas’s second straw first came online—literally as the city was finishing Intake 2, it was embarking on its third.
Intake 3 will cost $700 million—$350 for every man, woman, and child in Las Vegas. Intake 2, and the related pumping stations, cost $109 million a decade ago. In fact, as part of getting approval for Intake 2, the residents of Las Vegas voted themselves a sales tax increase to pay for Intake 2 and subsequent major water projects. The tax is small—one-quarter of one percent. To pay a penny in water sales tax, you have to spend $4. But that dedicated water tax (which is also paid by all the visitors to Las Vegas) brings in between $35 million and $50 million a year. Not many of us pay a water tax every time we shop, even a little one.
It is remarkable that in the space of fifteen years, one city will have spent $809 million on just two pipes—that’s $1,200 for every family in Las Vegas—and those two pipes, despite their cost and complexity, accomplish nothing in water-future terms. They don’t help Las Vegas get the water it will need for its next million residents or the next 25,000 hotel rooms—they are just a two-pipe emergency backup system. It’s like fire insurance on your house: It costs money—a lot over time—and if you have to use it, you’re in trouble. But without it, you’re in much worse trouble. Says Mulroy, “You can’t afford not to build it.”
Back in 1990, just after taking over as the head of Las Vegas’s water system, Mulroy instinctively realized two things: that Las Vegas couldn’t continue to use water the way it was if it wanted to grow, and that securing new water supplies would be both difficult and essential. The interesting thing about both those apparently banal insights is that doing anything about them requires not just insight but a vision for what the future might look like, and a kind of long-haul planning and long-haul determination that is mostly absent from public policy today, in water and everywhere else.
Las Vegas has filed for the unused groundwater supplies in the counties north of it, water that could prove essential to Las Vegas’s future growth, and a water supply that would for the first time be independent of Lake Mead. Whether or not the city could take that water without hurting the land under which the water sits, the political process to decide whether Las Vegas even gets to try has moved at a glacial pace.
In the twenty-one years Mulroy has been water chief, use of water in Las Vegas has dropped by 108 gallons per person per day—Las Vegans aren’t using 216 million gallons of water a day they would be without the dramatic conservation regime that has taken hold since 1989. As it happens, that’s almost the total amount of water the city was using in 1989—Las Vegans today save almost as much water as they used when Mulroy got her water job. But those kinds of water-use habits change very, very slowly. In any given year, per capita water use in Las Vegas only fell four or five gallons.45 You can’t save a hundred gallons of water per person per day with posters and TV commercials urging people to take shorter showers and skip a car wash. You save that much water by thinking twenty years ahead and imagining what it would take to change how a whole community operates, how it thinks about itself—and by giving people time to think differently about themselves, their community, and their water.
That’s what’s missing from the conversation in Atlanta—where the most serious water conservation law limits the hours you can water the grass, unless of course you’re watering important grass, like on a golf course. And it’s missing from the water conversation in most places that have serious water problems—not how to get through the dry spell or the drought, but how to think differently about the available water and change how we use it.
What the officials in Las Vegas realize, and what even the residents have come to appreciate by imposing a daily water tax on themselves, is that the cost of water isn’t what it takes to clean it and pump it to your house. The cost of water is, first, the cost of running out of water. What happens to an economy—in Las Vegas, in Atlanta, in Australia—built assuming a certain level of available water, when that water drops off dramatically?
And the cost of water is the cost to add the next gallon of supply—the effort and money, the time and political will required to find new water, secure it, and deliver it.
Neither of those costs is in your monthly water bill.
Patricia Mulroy, for all of her success both in helping Las Vegas change and helping Las Vegas grow, doesn’t sound optimistic. After she has spent twenty-one years trying to give Las Vegas a sense of both water appreciation and water security, the precipitous drop in Lake Mead makes the city seem less water secure than ever. “Are things kind of a mess now, again?” says Mulroy wryly. “Yes. Maybe I should have retired in 2000”—when Lake Mead was full.
Mulroy is worried about the impact of climate change on water supplies and water infrastructure. She’s helped form a climate-change alliance composed of some of the largest water utilities in the country.46 She’s worried about micropollutants—the residue from birth control pills, pharmaceuticals, pesticides—that seem to be slipping into drinking water supplies, including her own. “Does it need to be dealt with?” she says. “Absolutely.”
She’s worried about attitude. “Future generations are not going to be living the same way we’ve lived,” she says. “They’re not going to have the luxury of the abundance of supply per person that we enjoy.” In testimony to the U.S. Senate in 2009, Mulroy said, “We know that the way we’ve been managing water resources for the last hundred years is obsolete.”
By that, Mulroy means that, as individuals, as companies, as communities, we use water in ways that are wasteful and shortsighted, that don’t actually get real value out of the water available. That’s something we can only change by paying more attention to how we use water. No one person in Las Vegas, no one company in Atlanta, is causing the water problems in those places—everyone together is.
But there’s a much larger sense in which Mulroy thinks we’ve been mismanaging our water and will need to change. For Mulroy, water is just another resource—like electricity, or coal, or gold—and romanticizing water, or investing it with special status, doesn’t help you get it, manage it, and use it.
Mulroy briefly considered, for instance, building her own desalination plant on the Pacific coast in either California or Mexico, and piping the water three hundred miles inland to Las Vegas. What dissuaded her? The electricity just to pump the water from the coast to Las Vegas would cost $400 million a year, more than the entire operating budget of the SNWA. Not that she’s given up what seems like a wild idea, though. Mulroy has started talking to officials in both Mexico and California about building and operating a desalination plant, and trading the desal water to her hosts for a piece of their Lake Mead water.
Mulroy told President Obama he should consider a major public works water project, on the scale of Hoover Dam itself. She thinks the federal government should create a system of canals to capture, then divert Mississippi River floodwaters straight to the Midwest. When the Mississippi River floods, whole communities are devastated; the water they are devastated by is largely wasted. Mulroy isn’t talking about diverting the Mississippi itself—she knows something about the politics of river water—just the floodwaters.
The result, in theory, could save the Mississippi River basin from periodic natural disasters, it could allow states east of the Rocky Mountains to access a new source of water, it could even allow the United States to replenish the desperately falling Ogallala Aquifer in the high plains. “One man’s flood control is another man’s water supply,” says Mulroy. “You could capture 9 million to 14 million acre-feet of water a year.” That’s more than all the water Arizona, California, and Las Vegas take from the Colorado River.
“It’s an engineer’s idea,” Mulroy says. “People are still stunned by it. But the interstate highway network, what did that cost?” And where would we be without it?
One of the things that makes Mulroy positively angry is a territorial protectiveness people have about water. Perhaps that’s understandable, given that she and Las Vegas will never have any water that other people try to take. But she clearly thinks we have an immature attitude about how we manage water as a resource. The Great Lakes states, in the last five years, have passed a new agreement (that also includes Canada) forbidding any water from within the Great Lakes basin to be diverted in any way outside the basin. The compact was motivated in part by fear that dry western states would try to purchase water from Great Lakes communities and pipe the water west.
“We take gold, we take oil, we take uranium, we take natural gas from Texas to the rest of the country,” says Mulroy. “We move oil from Alaska to Mexico. But they say, ‘I will not give you one drop of water!’
“They’ve got 14 percent of the population of the United States, and 20 percent of the fresh water in the world—and no one can use it but them? ‘I might not need it. But I’m not sharing it!’
“When did it become their water anyway? It’s nuts!”
Imagine Texas passing a law that no oil drilled in Texas could leave the state.
Not, mind you, that Mulroy really thinks there would ever be a pipeline from Chicago to Las Vegas. She’s girding for the process of getting permits to build a pipeline to bring groundwater from only two counties away, if she ever gets permission to take it. But she finds irrational the attitude that regards transcontinental oil and natural gas pipelines as routine, even essential, and transcontinental water pipelines as unthinkable, even sinful. “Nothing makes better cheap politics than water,” she says.
Emerging from hours of conversation with Patricia Mulroy, you certainly end up with a heightened alertness to how water is being used and misused. And yet, right there on the Strip, in the midst of all the waterfalls and lagoons and fountains that Mulroy can both explain and justify, there appears to be a glaring irony. In the town that is paying golf courses to rip out acres of turf and specifying the hose nozzle you use to wash your car, the wide median along the city’s main street is covered in vivid green grass. How in the world does Mulroy justify cultivating turf down the center of Las Vegas Boulevard?
It’s actually a bit difficult to get out to the middle of the Strip—in most places, it’s flanked by four lanes of traffic in each direction. But if you dodge the tour buses and rental cars to dash out to the grassy median, and reach down and stroke the turf, you’ll find it soft, cool, and appealing to the touch. And then, if you grab it and pull, you’ll find that the blades are stubbornly planted and a whole patch tugs up when you grab just a bit.
The grass in the median of Las Vegas Boulevard turns out to be like many of the other water features on the Strip: like the canals of Venice and the shark reefs of Mandalay Bay and the topless allure of the adults-only swimming pools. The grass is soft, beautiful, perfectly cultivated. And it’s fake. Of course.
Las Vegas is a potent lesson in not taking water for granted, and also in not taking for granted that you understand the water you think you see.
The water that Las Vegas returns to Lake Mead—the purified wastewater that gets Las Vegas its critical return-flow credits—runs back to the reservoir in an old creek bed called the Las Vegas Wash. Right near the shore of Lake Mead, you can stand on the bank of the Las Vegas Wash and watch the water flowing back to the lake. The Las Vegas Wash has no natural flow. All its routine flow comes from the outfalls of the city’s wastewater treatment plants (and from storm water when it rains). The Wash looks like any other creek at the edge of an urban area. It meanders through the landscape, its banks creating a greenway through the desert. About four feet deep, the Wash is often not more than fifteen or twenty feet across.
When you stand on its banks, what you’re seeing is something remarkable: It’s the real-time indoor water use of all of Las Vegas, the water that 2 million Las Vegans are using right now to shower, to cook, to wash clothes, to clean the bathtubs in the suites of the Bellagio. The water moves at a good clip—it turns out to be about a million gallons every eight minutes—but part of what’s extraordinary about the current in the Wash is how utterly unremarkable it is.
In a city that prides itself on water wonders of all kinds, this quiet stream is in some ways the most wonderful of all. It’s a display not of the new tricks we can think of for water to do, but of a new way of thinking about water. We can use it, we can clean it, we can return it, and we can reuse it. That’s what the world itself has been doing since long before we arrived, and many water problems would get much easier to handle, or disappear altogether, if we could finally accept that lesson.
When you stand and watch the Fountains of Bellagio, it’s hard not to be amazed at what people have managed to get water to do. When you stand and watch the current of the Las Vegas Wash flowing back to Lake Mead, it’s a quiet reminder of what water can, eventually, get people to do.