There is no lack of water here [in the Southwest], unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
—Edward Abbey
Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the United States, is surrounded by steep cliffs that come in many shades of ruddy brown, except for a strange white band that runs along their base, just above the water-line, encircling the lake like a noose. Known as the bathtub ring, the white band is the result of the cliffs being submerged in calcium-rich water, which bleached out the color. But starting in 1999, the Southwest was gripped by the worst drought in five hundred years; over the next decade the reservoir’s water level dropped more than one hundred feet, and the bathtub ring grew steadily wider and more ominous.
Lake Mead was formed in 1935, when Hoover Dam impounded the Colorado River in Boulder Canyon, containing up to 9.3 trillion gallons of water when full. Ninety-seven percent of the lake’s water comes from the Colorado River; the remaining 3 percent comes from the Muddy and Virgin Rivers, and from a wetland called the Las Vegas Wash. Mead was built to supply water to Nevada, Arizona, and California; to generate electricity; to prevent flooding during wet years; and to create a recreational area. Mead’s chief beneficiary is Las Vegas. The lake provides 90 percent of the city’s water, and experts worry that Las Vegas’s near total reliance on a single troubled source makes it vulnerable to a crippling drought.
When I took a boat ride around Lake Mead in the spring of 2008, the drought was in its eighth year, and the white bathtub ring extended a startling 102 feet up the cliff face. The water level had dropped from 1,215 feet in 2000 to 1,095 feet in 2008, its lowest elevation since 1964. If the lake sinks below 1,050 feet, the water level will be beneath the intake valves—a state known as dead pool—and Las Vegas will lose up to 90 percent of its water supply. If that happens, people would have to abandon the city, the glittering Strip would go dark, and the desert would reassert itself.
“It’s simple math: there is no way to meet one hundred percent of people’s demand with only ten percent of the water supply,” said Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), the water agency for Clark County, when we met in June 2008. “If this drought continues much longer, it will change the West. It will change the way we use water. It will change the way we live.”
Trim and energetic, with a barking voice that cleaves through the most lugubrious water debate, Mulroy is a polarizing figure. The nation’s most prominent water manager, Mulroy is a longtime political ally of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and has herself been rumored as a gubernatorial candidate. She has been dubbed the Water Witch, Water Czarina, the Chosen One, and with many other less charitable nicknames.
“We grew out of the desert,” she said. “This is the city that wasn’t supposed to be.”
For Mulroy, the possibility of a crippling drought has an obvious solution: not to limit the city’s growth or raise water rates or conserve water more aggressively, as many outside experts have suggested, but to find a new source of water. She thinks she has found one. Mulroy has proposed building an enormous pipeline to pump billions of gallons of “unused” water from remote valleys in central-eastern Nevada almost three hundred miles south to Las Vegas.
According to many valley residents, Mulroy’s plan—which they refer to derisively as Pat’s Pipe—is the biggest water grab since William Mulholland turned the Owens Valley into Los Angeles’s private watering hole. The ranchers, along with a broad, loosely organized coalition of sportsmen, environmentalists, endangered-species regulators, Indian tribes, and Utah politicians, have been fighting Pat’s Pipe for nearly twenty years.
“Why does Las Vegas need more water? Simply to fuel more growth,” said Dean Baker, a slim, hawk-faced sixty-eight-year-old rancher, whose property sits over an important aquifer in remote Snake Valley, near the Utah border. “If Mulroy starts pumping our valley, the water table will go down and we’ll have some real, serious problems. It’s a lot like what happened in the Owens Valley.”
Nevada is the driest state in the nation. Lying in the rain shadow (where mountains block wind and rain, casting a dry “shadow” behind them) of the Sierra Nevada, it receives only seven inches of precipitation a year on average, and drought is a regular feature of life. Las Vegas—which is tucked into a sliver of territory in the southeastern corner of the state, between Death Valley and the Grand Canyon—receives only four inches of rain a year. It is the driest city in the driest state in America. But it wasn’t always that way.
Las vegas is the Spanish phrase for “the meadows,” or “the alluvial plain.” In 1829, a party of Spanish explorers gave the name to a green oasis they found in a hot, dusty valley. The springs at Las Vegas had so much natural water pressure that they were said to erupt from the earth “in geysers.” In the first half of the twentieth century, enough water was in the aquifers beneath Las Vegas that kids swam in the springs, and lawn sprinklers were ubiquitous. But as the city expanded, groundwater levels dipped. By the 1950s, the water beneath the valley had been pumped out so thoroughly that the land began to subside, and parts of Nellis Air Force Base caved in. The hotels and casinos and golf courses that came to define Las Vegas proliferated, but most of the springs had run dry by 1962. From then on, the city relied on Lake Mead, which is to say the Colorado River, for 90 percent of its water.
The Colorado begins as snowmelt trickling out of a remote part of the Never Summer Range, in the high Rocky Mountains. A cold and clear rivulet up there, above the tree line and two miles above sea level, it descends through gorges to become a thundering red-brown colossus that flows 1,450 miles south, providing water for over 27 million people in seven states, several Indian reservations, and Mexico. For centuries, the river flowed all the way to the Sea of Cortés (aka the Gulf of California), its nutrients creating a rich ecosystem in the warm, protected seawater between the Baja Peninsula and the northwest coast of Mexico. But in the last century, the river was so overused that now it reaches the sea only in exceptionally wet years.
A 2008 study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the nation’s oldest earth-science research centers, made a startling assertion: overuse of the Colorado River, combined with drought, has created a net deficit of almost 1 million acre-feet (about 3.25 million gallons) of water per year. That is equivalent to the water supply for 8 million people. “There is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead … will be dry by 2021,” the report concluded. Using the same data, the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Lake Mead, paints a slightly rosier picture and predicts the Colorado will face water shortages 58 to 73 percent of the time by 2050. Regardless of the details, one thing is certain: the river is in trouble. Lake Mead is dropping, and Nevada’s growth—particularly Las Vegas’s unbridled expansion into the desert—is restricted by a lack of water.
Of the seven states that signed the Colorado River Compact, a landmark agreement on the allocation of the river’s water, Nevada has always received the smallest portion. In 1922, when the original deal was struck, the state had few residents, but as Nevada grew so did its water needs. In 1910, the permanent population of Clark County, in southern Nevada, was 3,321. By 2010, it was 2 million. The entire state has only 2.72 million residents, meaning that Las Vegas is the economic and political engine that drives Nevada. In most cases, Las Vegas gets its way. And so it has been, more or less, with Pat Mulroy’s pipeline.
In 1978, when she was twenty-five years old, Pat Mulroy was hired as a $13,000-a-year junior management analyst by Richard Bunker, the Clark County manager, a top political office. “I thought I died and went to heaven,” recalled Mulroy, who had been raised in Germany by an American father and a German mother. Bunker is a Mormon who doesn’t gamble or drink, yet has become one of the state’s top casino lobbyists and a major force in state politics. Mulroy proved so effective that she was sent to Carson City to lobby for Clark County before the state legislature. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it taught her how to create legislation and get it passed. In 1989, Mulroy was named general manager of the Las Vegas Water District.
In 1991 the district and seven other water companies that service Clark County formed a cooperative for regional water issues called the Southern Nevada Water Authority, or SNWA. Pat Mulroy helped to champion the idea, and she was named the new agency’s general manager. Abhorring waste, she embarked on an ambitious water-conservation program. Lawns, which are not native to the desert and require vast amounts of water to maintain, were her first target. One study showed that 65 percent of the water flowing to Southwestern suburbs was used to maintain lawns and wash cars. “People move here from all over, and they bring every water-sucking plant in the world—bluegrass from Kentucky, magnolias from Florida, roses from England, lawns from Chicago,” Mulroy said, rolling her eyes. “Newsflash: we live in a desert. If you choose to live in a desert, then use appropriate landscaping. This need to conquer nature, the unwillingness to live within the confines of the environment, has got to change.”
In 2002, she instituted a “cash for grass” incentive program to curtail lawns and employed water police to ticket excessive watering. People hated the program at first, but SNWA’s carrot-and-stick approach eventually removed over 60 million square feet of grass—enough, Mulroy claims, “to lay a strip of sod roughly one-third of the way around Earth.” An SNWA study found that 76 percent of the water used by Las Vegas went to maintaining lawns; the number has now dropped below 70 percent. Mulroy put golf courses on a water budget and forced them to rip out most of their nonfield turf, such as grass on parking-lot dividers. Now, many of them use artificial turf on nonplaying surfaces and have their own weather stations, computerized humidity sensors, and water-recycling facilities.
Mulroy’s next crusade was what she called “the war of the fountains [small, decorative displays] and water features [the dramatic water shows along the Strip].” Many of Las Vegas’s hotels and casinos use large, ornate water features, such as the Bellagio’s famous “dancing fountains.” These spray gorgeously to entice people inside, but they evaporate many gallons of water in the hundred-plus-degree days of summer. Spraying water in the desert is a deliberately theatrical gesture, one that sets the tone for the entire city: “This is a city built on fantasy, where the normal rules don’t apply,” it seems to say. The water features are an obvious target for conservationists, yet Mulroy contends that hotels and casinos use water efficiently. “The much maligned Strip uses only three percent of our water [when recycling is taken into account] while providing jobs to tens of thousands of Nevadans,” she said. “If you were to shut off the canals at the Venetian and the fountains at the Bellagio, you would affect the mainstay of our economy. The casinos are the largest economic driver in the state, by far. Why would you not invest three percent of your water in making them attractive to tourists?”
When Steve Wynn, the legendary casino and hotel developer, was building Treasure Island, a hotel-casino with a nautical water feature that included a “sea” in which a life-size replica of a pirate ship does battle with a naval frigate, he wanted to know how to maintain the illusion of an ocean in the desert. “Double-plumb Treasure Island,” Mulroy replied. “Use gray water in your features.” And so he did. Treasure Island (now owned by MGM) recycles wastewater from the showers and sinks in its three thousand rooms in a reverse-osmosis facility, then pipes it to the hotel’s water feature. As a result, Wynn became an important ally for Mulroy, an advocate for water conservation in the gaming and hotel industries, and a proponent of the pipeline plan.
Each year, the SNWA spends about $3.5 million to run ads that encourage residents to conserve water by planting native species (xeriscaping), using low-flow showerheads, covering swimming pools (to avoid evaporation), watering their grounds at night, and so on. To a degree, the effort has paid off. Between 2002 and 2008, the population of Las Vegas grew by four hundred thousand people, yet water consumption dropped by 18 percent, or 15 billion gallons, thanks to conservation. “If you do the slide-rule math, Las Vegas could keep growing and growing because we constantly reuse our water,” Mulroy insisted.
In spite of these rosy numbers, however, Las Vegas continues to use more water per day than many other cities with tenuous drinking supplies. According to the SNWA, Las Vegans used about 254 gallons of water per capita per day (gpcd) in 2009. Mulroy has set a goal of 199 gpcd by 2035. But other cities have already done much better: Long Beach uses 105 gpcd; San Diego, 150 gpcd; and Albuquerque, 175 gpcd.
A survey shows the top one hundred private water users in the Las Vegas valley—including many of the casino owners and real estate developers who have strongly supported Mulroy’s pipeline—use enough water for nearly two thousand homes. One property, owned by the sultan of Brunei, uses 17 million gallons of water per year, and Mulroy herself used six hundred and fifty-two thousand gallons in 2010 (when she suffered “a substantial leak”). A 2007 study by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California, think tank, found that a more aggressive conservation program could save Las Vegas the same amount of water that the pipeline would take from rural basins. Mulroy vehemently disagrees with those conclusions, complaining that the institute focused on “indoor conservation”—more efficient toilets and showers—where “the relative gain is marginal” and doesn’t alter the essential problem: “you cannot create more water.”
Water rates in Las Vegas are comparatively low, which critics say encourages demand and furthers growth. In summer months, a Las Vegan household typically uses seventeen thousand gallons of water per month and pays $36.64, or about two cents per ten gallons, according to SNWA. Average use in the winter is eleven thousand gallons, costing $21. But critics such as UC Berkeley resource economist David Zetland contend that low water rates are self-defeating. “Many people blame the ‘shortage’ of water in the southwest US on overpopulation … this critique is not valid for water (the shortage is because demand exceeds supply at low LOW prices),” Zetland writes in his Aguanomics blog. Reducing development, he says, will reduce water demand: “One way to do this … is to raise water prices—if it’s too expensive to do business or live in Las Vegas, people will move to places where it’s cheaper.”
Mulroy takes exception to that: “Pricing alone will not effectuate more conservation. It is one of several tools we use. But Las Vegas is a very affluent community. For the sultan of Brunei, it doesn’t matter what we charge him. On the other hand, I have a problem with affixing high water rates on the backs of the little guy who can’t afford it.”
In other words, raising water prices is politically risky. As is the suggestion that land-use policy and water-use policy be more directly linked. Currently, a development is proposed and then water is found to supply it. Critics say this formula has it backward: new building should take place only if there is enough water to support it. Mulroy dodges this question, saying that her only job is to supply water, not restrict Clark County’s growth.
“We’re expecting one hundred million more people in this country by 2040,” she said. “Everybody talks about ‘controlling growth.’ Well, tell me, where do we want people to go? You could shut the town down, I guess, but I don’t know of any metropolitan area in a no-growth mode. It’s not whether Las Vegas grows, it’s how we grow. If we are smart about our water and waste, this community can grow forever.”
It’s an intriguing thought, but it may be a wishful one. The earth has a fixed supply of freshwater: to manage it sustainably, man will have no choice but to link land use and water use more intentionally and to radically shift the way urban centers are planned. As the examples of Perth, Australia, Barcelona, Spain, Atlanta, Georgia, and other drought-stricken cities have shown, water supply will increasingly limit growth—especially in regions such as southern Nevada, which are in the bull’s-eye for aridification by global warming.
In October 1998, the water in Lake Mead reached a nearly all-time high of 1,215.76 feet. A year later, the Colorado River Basin slipped into the first year of what would become an extended drought. In 2000, the flow of water into the basin, the so-called inflow, was 62 percent of its sixty-five-year average. In 2001, the inflow dropped to 59 percent of average. In 2002, it was 25 percent of average, the lowest inflow ever recorded along the Colorado River. Since then, flow rates have fluctuated up and down, and by 2007 Mead and its sister reservoir, Lake Powell—where the Glen Canyon Dam impounds the Colorado on the Utah/Arizona border, two hundred miles upstream from Mead—were at 50 percent of capacity.
When I interviewed Mulroy in 2008, she had decided that incremental steps were insufficient to stave off “disaster” in Las Vegas. “It’s time to begin looking at our water resources in a more holistic fashion,” she said. By which she meant, the answer was to build a pipeline to transfer billions of gallons of “rural water” from Clark, Nye, Lincoln, and White Pine Counties down to the city. The pipe would supply about 25 percent of the water Las Vegas currently takes from the Colorado River. In the event that Lake Mead falls to dead pool, Mulroy said, the pipeline would provide enough water to allow the city to survive, as long as strict conservation measures are followed.
The plan is technically feasible, but it is expensive, divisive, and carries heavy environmental risks. The debate over Pat Mulroy’s pipeline has crystallized a question that is becoming increasingly important in the New West: what is water really worth?
Las Vegas sits at the intersection of three deserts. To the south is the Sonoran, to the west is the Mojave, and to the north lies the Great Basin. The Sonoran and Mojave are “hot” deserts, where the temperature can rise to 120 degrees on a summer day, and fall to 10 below zero on a winter night. The Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and part of Utah, is a “cold” desert surrounded by snowy peaks. During the spring snowmelt, those peaks release billions of gallons of water into the carbonate aquifers of the Great Basin, a vast endorheic watershed (one that doesn’t flow to the sea) that extends between the Wasatch Mountains to the east, to the Sierra Nevada to the west, and from Utah into Nevada. Hydrologists have had their eye on that water for years.
In the mid-1980s, when many of the wells in the Las Vegas valley began to go dry, a USGS groundwater specialist named Terry Katzer had a brain-flash: what if Las Vegas could tap into the aquifers beneath the sparsely inhabited valleys of the Great Basin Desert? John Bredehoeft, who was in charge of Western water for USGS at the time, cautioned that water stored in aquifers is protected. “Taking water out of storage is mining,” he reminded Katzer, according to the Las Vegas Sun. Water mining, pumping water faster than it is replenished, is illegal in Nevada. The Great Basin’s porous limestone and dolomite aquifer allows groundwater to flow from valley to valley, for hundreds of miles. Bredehoet and other experts believed that the hot playas above them have no water to spare. What little water they do have is already spoken for, by ranchers, flora, fauna—and, not incidentally, Utah. If water is mined from one valley, it will suck water from other valleys, which could potentially destroy springs and creeks, kill off plants and animals, and spark a border war between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City.
But Katzer’s idea had caught the eye of Pat Mulroy. In October 1989, the Las Vegas Water District quietly filed applications with the state engineer for “unclaimed, unused” groundwater in thirty basins in rural east-central Nevada, as an “insurance policy against drought.” This represented about 840,000 acre-feet of water, an amount believed to be the equivalent of half the unclaimed water in the state. It was the single biggest groundwater claim in the history of Nevada.
Rural people had no idea that the city was laying claim to the water beneath their ranches until the filings were announced in local newspapers. “It was a dirty trick!” state senator Virgil Getto complained to the Las Vegas Sun. Critics of the plan began to organize protests.
Mulroy ignored them, and between 2006 and 2009 SNWA spent $78 million to buy seven ranches in White Pine County, along with their water rights. In Nevada, water rights are assigned for a purpose, in this case cattle ranching and alfalfa growing. To use its new water supply, the SNWA had to go into ranching.
“Watching the city try to run four thousand sheep?” Dean Baker dead-panned. “That’ll be … interesting.”
All of the water in Nevada is owned by the state (citizens purchase the right to use it): if the state engineer grants the SNWA permits to build the pipeline, and Mulroy can mollify her many critics and convince regulators that draining the valleys won’t harm endangered species, then, she says, it will take about ten to fifteen years to build her “in-state groundwater project,” as she insists on calling the pipeline. The pipeline itself will take only three years to build. The first leg will extend north from Las Vegas to Delamar and Dry Lake Valleys, the first two “stepping-stone” basins from which groundwater will be pumped. The pipe will then reach into Cave Valley, Spring Valley, and ultimately up to Snake Valley, where Baker’s ranch is. When the project is finished, the system of pipes, pumps, and storage reservoirs will stretch about 300 miles and cost between $2 billion and $3.5 billion. Opponents say the project will cost far more and deliver far less water than the SNWA claims.
The two basins with the most potential to supply Las Vegas with water are in White Pine County: Spring Valley and Snake Valley. In July 2006, SNWA bought the Robison Ranch in Spring Valley for an attention-getting sum of $22 million. Before long, almost every ranch along the valley floor had sold out to the SNWA.
The SNWA applied to the state engineer for a permit to suck more than 16 billion gallons of groundwater a year from Snake Valley, which is enough to service one hundred thousand average Las Vegas homes. The agency has characterized this water as “unused.” To do so with a straight face, it has relied on Western water law to argue that native plants, such as greasewood, are not “legally entitled” to the valley’s water as they have no “beneficial use.” Greasewood, which serves as forage for cattle and deer, is a phreatophyte, a class of plant with long roots that stretch deep underground. Las Vegas’s plan is to target “weeds” such as greasewood: pumping hard and fast would kill them off; once the plants are gone, the city will use the snowmelt previously claimed by the plants. But not only does greasewood support animal life, its sturdy roots hold the earth in place. Killing off the phreatophytes could lead to dust storms that might rival those blowing off the Owens and Mono lake beds.
At Dean Baker’s ranch in Snake Valley, he and I climb into his old SUV and motor slowly over the bright desert until we stop at a shallow sandy bowl. “This used to be Antelope Corral,” Baker explains. Because of a drought, he said, “It’s drier now than it ever was.” A ragged muddy hole about a foot deep has been scraped out of a gully by thirsty badgers and coyotes. “This used to be a pond,” he says, kicking at the talc-dry dust with the toe of his cowboy boot, revealing the bleached shells of freshwater snails. “And all around here was meadow. Now these sand dunes are the biggest source of dust in the valley. If they start pumping here …” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but the implication is clear.
Halfway across the valley we cross an invisible borderline into Utah and pull to a stop at Needle Point Spring. In 1939, the Civilian Conservation Corps excavated the spring, and every year a trough and a nearby pond filled with water to slake the thirst of cattle and wild horses. In the summer of 2001, the spring level suddenly dropped a couple of feet and the trough went dry. A dozen wild horses died of thirst nearby. A federal study concluded that the likely cause was that a ranch about a mile away had increased the pumping of groundwater for irrigation that year, lowering the water table. To Dean Baker, the lesson is that “even a little extra pumping lowers the water level. So how is it we are supposed to have enough water to supply the city of Las Vegas? The pipeline will make this valley into an environmental nightmare—that will be Harry Reid’s legacy.”
Once, Dean Baker and Senator Harry Reid were trusted allies. Reid, who was named Senate majority leader in 2007, was born in Searchlight, a mining camp south of Las Vegas, in 1939, the son of an alcoholic miner (who committed suicide) and a mother who was a laundress for brothels. After suffering a hard-knocks childhood, he converted to Mormonism, earned a law degree, and became the right-hand man to the popular governor Mike O’Callaghan. Reid was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982 and to the Senate in 1986. In 1985, Reid helped to promote Great Basin National Park, a seventy-seven-thousand-acre preserve famous for the Lehman Caves and ancient stands of bristlecone pine. The park had been debated for sixty years; Nevada had no national park, and Reid was determined to fix that. He had the support of a wide coalition of environmentalists and urbanites. The biggest hurdle was water. Local ranchers such as Dean Baker worried that a park designation might curtail their access to aquifers and opposed it. But when Reid gave his word that the ranchers’ water supply would be protected, they relented, and the park was signed into existence in 1986. It was, Reid has said, one of the biggest victories of his career.
But in 2000, Harry Reid sided with Pat Mulroy in support of the SNWA pipeline. To the people of White Pine County, this was regarded as a deep, personal betrayal. “Harry Reid gave his word that draining down our water won’t be his legacy,” Baker said in a cold fury. “But he got himself in too deep.”
Mulroy has a starkly different view of the senator: “Harry Reid is our secret weapon. As he’s moved up in seniority in Washington, Nevada’s become more respected.” Reid has raised the SNWA’s profile and helped it negotiate permission from the formerly distrustful Department of Interior for the pipeline to cross federal lands. Mulroy has many other influential supporters, including casino operators, developers, and politicians such as Governor Jim Gibbons, who initially opposed SNWA’s plan but now supports it.
Dean Baker doesn’t have Mulroy’s connections, but he, too, has powerful allies. They include environmentalists, Indian tribes, and even the least chub—a tiny fish found in only a few desert springs and which is under consideration for listing as an endangered species. That ruling could thwart SNWA’s water-siphoning plan, which could wipe out the fish’s habitat. And Dean Baker has a secret weapon of his own: the State of Utah.
The Great Basin aquifer flows from Utah into Nevada under Baker’s ranch. If Las Vegas pumps water out of Snake Valley, it could draw down the reserves of Utah ranchers, just a few miles away. The ranchers, many of whom are wealthy, politically connected descendants of early Mormon settlers, have not been shy in expressing their extreme opposition to Las Vegas’s pipe. The ripples of their displeasure washed all the way to Washington, DC, where, in 2000, Congress required Nevada and Utah to enter into an agreement before any water was exported from their shared aquifer under Snake Valley.
“Utah,” Mulroy said, has “stonewalled” Las Vegas’s pipeline. But Utah’s opposition wasn’t simply a principled defense of its farmers; Utah would like to build a 158-mile pipe of its own, which would suck water from Lake Powell and send it through southwestern Utah, then up to St. George, a retirement mecca and one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation.
Behind closed doors, representatives of the two states tried to forge what appeared to be a quid pro quo: if Nevada backed Utah’s bid for a St. George pipeline (which would require a federal right-of-way ruling), then Utah would back SNWA’s pipeline to Snake Valley. But the negotiations dragged. In 2006, Pat Mulroy declared that the longer Utah waited to endorse SNWA’s pipeline, “the more uncomfortable it will become for Utah. If they can do it to another state, they can have it done to them, too.” Offended, Utah refused to sign a water-sharing agreement with Nevada. Mulroy dismissed this as petty and said, “Our main driver for developing groundwater is for drought protection.”
In 2010, the two states were still squabbling. Mulroy sniped that Salt Lakers didn’t know how to spell the word conservation, while Utahans scoffed at Mulroy’s offer to swap Snake Valley water for a greater allotment of Colorado River water: “It’s a good news bite, but it’s not possible [under the Colorado Compact] and she knows it,” said a government official.
In the early 1980s, when Timothy Durbin was head of USGS’s California office, he modeled the effects of pumping water from the Owens Valley. In 2001, he joined Terry Katzer at the SNWA as a groundwater consultant. When he forecasts the effect of transporting water out of the Great Basin, Durbin told the Las Vegas Sun, “The Owens Valley is a model of what to expect.”
Las Vegas has applied to withdraw ninety thousand acre-feet a year of water from Spring Valley. To simulate what effect such withdrawals might have, Katzer and Durbin created a computer model that showed the valley’s water table would drop two hundred feet or more over seventy-five years. This would kill off the greasewood, as planned. But it could also dry up thousands of acres of federally owned land, destroy endangered species and other animals, and close down ranches founded by Nevada’s pioneer families. Suddenly, the comparisons to Owens Valley didn’t seem so far-fetched.
The Nevada state engineer is the arbiter of whether the pipeline project can move ahead. Once an applicant files for water rights, the state engineer has eight months to review the claim, hear objections, and render a decision. The amount of water awarded is determined by whether withdrawals will affect existing water rights holders, and how much withdrawn water will be replaced by rain and snowmelt.
In 2007, Durbin testified before Nevada state engineer Tracy Taylor but didn’t mention the results of his model because, he told the Las Vegas Sun, no one asked about them. Taylor granted Las Vegas the use of forty thousand acre-feet of Spring Valley water a year, for ten years. (The city is required to monitor its withdrawals and file an annual report. After a decade, the withdrawals can be raised to sixty thousand acre-feet a year, unless they cause problems.)
After the hearing, Durbin said, he felt great remorse for what he had left unspoken. In 2008 he once again appeared before Taylor, only this time he represented a group of pipeline critics. He put the results of his ground-water model on the record. To his surprise, the SNWA hardly reacted. Only later did he realize why: they had already gotten what they wanted—approval to pump water from the valleys—and had no incentive to call attention to his damning projections.
Pat Mulroy shrugs off Durbin and Katzer as “two consultants” and their research as “just a model.”
Opponents to the SNWA pipeline, such as the Great Basin Network, relied on Simeon Herskovits, a slim, bushy-haired, and bespectacled environmental attorney from Taos, New Mexico, to press their case. In 2007, Herskovits challenged a state senate ruling that had denied pipeline protesters a hearing within a year of the close of the protest period, as is required by law. When his motion was denied, he appealed the case up to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Over the next two years, the SNWA won a string of victories. In 2008, State Engineer Taylor granted Las Vegas almost nineteen thousand acre-feet of water from its first three claims in Cave, Dry Lake, and Delamar Valleys, south of Snake Valley. In the summer of 2009, as the fight over Snake Valley escalated, so did Mulroy’s rhetoric. She declared that if the SNWA board voted to halt the pipeline, the result would be “an absolute hole” in Las Vegas’s water supply by 2020. She said that without a secure water supply, Nevada would have a difficult time recovering from the recession. Without a backup supply, she warned Las Vegans, “You’re going to live like Amman, Jordan. You’re going to get water once a week … [if] you don’t have water in hydrants, you can’t put out a major fire.”
In the end, Taylor granted Las Vegas about half the rural water it wanted, some 6 billion gallons annually. And in August 2009, Utah governor Gary R. Herbert agreed to allow the SNWA to pipe thirty-six thousand acre-feet of water a year from the Great Basin to Las Vegas. Pat Mulroy had won. After twenty years of cajoling, maneuvering, spending, and compromising, the SNWA had at last secured the right to build its pipeline.
Two months later, the victory began to unravel.
In October 2009, Nevada district judge Norman C. Robison struck down Tracy Taylor’s rulings on three of the four rural basins—Cave, Delamar and Dry Lake Valleys—along Las Vegas’s pipeline. The state engineer had “acted arbitrarily, capriciously and oppressively,” Robison wrote. Allowing such significant withdrawals requires “specific empirical data,” he wrote, but Taylor was “simply hoping for the best while committing to undo his decision if the worst occurs.” The SNWA countercharged that Judge Robison, who lives in rural Nevada, was “flat-out wrong” and was biased against the city: “We believe the judge ignored the evidence and improperly substituted his opinion.”
In late January 2010, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Tracy Taylor and state engineers who preceded him had violated the due-process rights of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Great Basin residents. When Las Vegas filed applications for rural water rights in 1989, more than eight hundred “interested persons” had filed protests. But the number of protesters had risen to over three thousand by 1990, when the protest period closed. In 2005, the state engineer denied the protesters’ request to reopen the protest period, and the pipeline’s critics, represented by Simeon Herskovits, took the matter to the state supreme court. In January 2010, the court ruled for the protesters, throwing the future of Las Vegas’s pipeline into question. Utah suspended its water-sharing agreement with Nevada “indefinitely,” saying that the ruling “significantly changes the landscape.”
Although the pipeline project did not die, the January 2010 reversal was its most stunning setback yet. Pat Mulroy, who had staked her considerable reputation on the pipeline and had already spent an estimated $180 million to develop it, called the supreme court’s decision “disappointing.” The SNWA said it would ask the court to reconsider “because we believe the justices may not fully appreciate the far-reaching ramifications of their decision.”
Up in White Pine County, opponents cheered the latest twist in the saga. In 2010, the SNWA’s request for another hearing was scheduled to be returned to Judge Robison. The Nevada legislature, which was struggling with budget shortfalls, said it would not have time to focus on the pipeline until its 2011 session.
In February 2009, Lake Mead was at 46 percent of capacity: the water level had dropped 5 feet lower than a year earlier and 118 feet below its high point a decade earlier. In February 2010, heavy rains swept across the West, which decreased demand for irrigation water in California and Arizona and helped to raise Lake Mead by more than a foot. The Bureau of Reclamation declared 2010 a “normal” water delivery year, which gave the impression that the decade-long drought was about to end. But that was not the case. The more important indicator—snowpack levels in the Utah mountains that feed Colorado River tributaries—stood at about 70 percent of average, which did not portend well.
If the drought does not break, and Lake Mead’s water level dips below the critical dead-pool level of 1,050 feet, the consequences for Las Vegas, and much of the West, could be catastrophic. But few people actually want to see Las Vegas dry up and blow away, so if the Colorado River Basin hits critical lows, then Congress will likely come to the rescue with federal assistance. Just what that might entail remains unanswered. (Mulroy has suggested a “dramatic” replumbing of the nation’s water system in which Midwestern floodwater would be sent to the parched West, a subject I will return to later.) Furthermore, the “hotel-casino complex,” as locals refer to Nevada’s biggest businesses, is highly unlikely to allow Las Vegas to die of thirst. As Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman succinctly put it, “The bottom line is that we’ll never run out of water as long as we can pay for it.”
Yet Mulroy worries that her opponents don’t take the looming crisis seriously enough. “People refuse to change their habits until they absolutely have to—which in this case will be too late,” she insists. “We’ll have no choice” but to build the in-state project. But Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute, disagrees: “Rather than looking outward to take water from rural counties, Las Vegas could look inward and figure out how to use water more effectively.”
The threat that a major city could be relinquished to the dust, heat, and tumbleweeds has proven sufficiently apocalyptic to spur a search for creative new solutions to drought.
In 2005, well before the Great Basin court ruling, Pat Mulroy announced that desalination, the purification of salty or otherwise dirty water for drinking, would play a significant role in Nevada’s future. But with further study, Mulroy conceded that the plan was technically and politically complex and in the end let Nevada dependent on the overextended Colorado. She later said that while desal remains a viable option, “one tool in the toolbox,” it is not a solution.
In a 2007 agreement between the Department of Interior and the seven Colorado Basin states, a new set of guidelines was established on how to share the Colorado River in case of extreme drought. If Lake Mead drops to an elevation of 1,075 feet above sea level, the first “shortage declaration” will be triggered, which will cut water deliveries to Nevada by thirteen thousand acre-feet a year, or enough water to supply twenty-six thousand average Clark County homes. (Arizona would be shorted more than ten times that amount.)
To buy time, the SNWA has initiated a series of stopgap remedies. By 2014, the agency hopes to have completed a “third straw,” a new pipeline, that will reach deeper into Lake Mead than the two existing pipes, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. It has snapped up water leases for the Muddy and Virgin Rivers, which are tributaries of the Colorado. It has worked with California and Arizona to build a new reservoir in Southern California, called Drop 2, to store excess water from the Colorado and capture runoff; controversially, Drop 2 will also restrict flows into Mexico. If the SNWA needs emergency water, it will swap its portion of Drop 2 water for a greater percentage of the other states’ Colorado River water. And Nevada has paid Arizona $100 million to “bank” 1.25 million acre-feet of water in massive underground aquifers.
Yet all of these plans rely on the Colorado River, which remains badly overstretched.
On July 24, 1983, Lake Mead reached a record elevation of 1,225.85 feet above sea level, and engineers feared that the concrete of Hoover Dam’s spillway would buckle (it did not).
At 11:30 a.m. on October 17, 2010, the water level in Lake Mead dipped to 1,083.18 feet above sea level, its lowest point since Hoover Dam impounded the Colorado River seventy-five years earlier. This record-low watermark was set during the region’s eleventh year of drought, when demand for water was surging across the West. As Nevadans erected new casinos, Californians washed their cars, and Arizonans strolled green golf links in the brown desert, most were unaware of, or unconcerned by, the drying reservoir. But a few were alarmed. “This strikes me as an amazing moment,” said Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s three-quarters of a century since they filled [Mead]. And at the three-quarters mark, the world has changed.”
The predominate image of Las Vegas is of the glittering Strip, but in reality that represents a thin slice of the metropolitan area. Drive just a mile or so in any direction from the soaring, flashy epicenter, and you will notice that the city spreads low and wide, with acres of stucco tract housing extending into the desert. When you reach the city’s outer rim, where developments often come to an abrupt halt in the middle of dusty ocher expanses, it is clear that Las Vegas builders have no intention of stopping there. Once the economy rebounds, the city will resume its relentless expansion. But to do so Las Vegas will need more water.
As currently configured, Pat’s Pipe is designed to pump 134,000 acre-feet of water from five rural basins by 2020, which is enough water to provide for 270,000 homes. Yet the University of Nevada estimates that the population of SNWA’s service area will grow to 3.6 million by 2035, nearly double what it was in 2009. The agency hasn’t said how it plans to hydrate so many people or how it will win the legal right to build the pipeline.
To critics, the SNWA’s plan to provide low-cost water to twice as many customers in a few years is tantamount to promoting irresponsible development. “Cheap water is what fuels growth,” charged Nevada assemblyman Joe Hogan, an SNWA opponent. “There is no appetite in the water community to even consider charging what the water is worth, or charging higher rates to … water wasters.”
Pat Mulroy contends that her pipeline is designed not to expand Las Vegas but to protect Clark County from extended drought. Her defenders say that she is not pro-growth, nor is she a policymaker; she is merely a civil servant whose job is to provide Las Vegas with water. Blame politicians or developers for the state’s water woes, they say, but don’t blame Pat Mulroy.
But this is disingenuous. Pat Mulroy is the highest-profile water manager in the nation, with influence that extends throughout Nevada, the six other Colorado Basin states, Mexico, and into the US Senate. Every time she argues for low water rates, purchases rural water rights, funds controversial pipelines, and avoids discussion of the environmental impact of her ideas, she is making policy—if not in name, then in fact. Her larger message is that Las Vegas will use whatever legal means it can to ensure a plentiful supply of affordable water in coming years. Plainly, if that policy is not linked to restrictions on development, it will only encourage growth.
She is shrewd and not to be underestimated, but even Pat Mulroy can’t have it both ways forever. Unless she adjusts her actions to match her rhetoric about the realities of the New West, then her greatest strength—her ability to get the water she wants, regardless of the consequences—may lead to her undoing and, in a worst-case scenario, to the undoing of “the city that wasn’t supposed to be.”
As controversial as water pipelines have been, the damming of rivers is an equally, if not more, emotionally charged subject. By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of the world’s rivers remained undammed. According to a study by Water Alternatives, an academic journal, there were forty-five thousand large-scale dams in 2010, which, despite their many benefits—hydropower, flood control, water storage, recreation, and the like—had displaced some 40 to 80 million people, altered natural river flows, disrupted aquatic ecosystems, and led to a buildup of silt and the release of greenhouse gases.
Although dam building in the United States has been greatly curtailed because of these concerns, it has not been stopped. As I discovered in California, dam building remains a potent symbol of mankind’s ability to harness nature to his needs, and a political tool that tends to pit farmers of the Old West against the cities and industries of the New West. The debate has swung wildly back and forth, with billions of dollars in the balance.