To supplement its supply, the authority first applied for water rights in 1989 in five rural basins (the Snake, Spring, Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys), but it held off on major action until midway through the drought in the 2000s.
The water authority wants up to 175,000 acre-feet per year (afy) from the valleys, an undertaking that would cost $3.2 billion if it were built today with cash, according to SNWA estimates. Accounting for legal delays, inflation and financing, projections rise to $15.4 billion.
"We need to buttress our water supply, plain and simple," Entsminger said. A March 2011 planning document lists drought and "predictions of reduced river flow due to climate change" as top motivations for SNWA's proposal.
How do you 'stretch' water?
But rural Nevadans and Utahns worry the pipeline would do irreversible damage to their range. They say there simply isn't enough water to share.
"We live very close to the land, and we see springs dry up or get low in drought years," said Kathy Hill, a schoolteacher and lifelong Snake Valley resident. "We also see how the whole desert just greens up when it rains, and plants and animals flourish. How can this water be taken without severely affecting us?"
Hill lives on a 40-acre homestead in Partoun, Utah, about 50 unpaved miles from Baker. The water authority proposes drilling nine production wells in Snake Valley to pump 50,000 acre-feet per year.
Ranchers in the valley and throughout the Great Basin rely on a combination of mountain runoff and groundwater pumping to tend to their crops. Their own pumping can strain the water supply -- causing natural-running artesian wells to go dry, for example -- and they say the pipeline project would put them over the edge.
"We're trying to stretch the water," said rancher Don Anderson, who lives in Callao, 23 miles north of Partoun, along that same dirt road. "We have already impacted ourselves at this level. We couldn't withstand a project such as that."
"I would have to go out of business," he added. Anderson operates a 1,000-acre calf-cow ranch and grows alfalfa and corn for the livestock; the homestead has been in his wife Beth's family for 130 years.
Callao's wet meadows are what made it an "oasis" for ranching in the first place, Anderson said. The isolated community is home to five working ranches and just a few dozen residents. It's more than 50 miles from the nearest paved road. Beth Anderson shrugs off the fact that the closest grocery store is hours away.
Theoretically, the ranchers could drill deeper to access lower sections of the aquifer, and SNWA would be required to pay for that. But what can't be protected against, the ranchers say, is the lowering of the entire water table. They worry that even distant SNWA wells would eliminate the shallow groundwater and surface water that feed grassy meadows needed to raise livestock.
The water authority has vowed to follow a plan laid out by BLM to monitor the production wells and decrease or stop pumping if major environmental impacts are seen. But Snake Valley residents call it an empty promise. "You can't believe anything they say," quipped retired Callao rancher Cecil Garland, 86. "I wouldn't believe them if they walked in the yard here and said hello." Distrust for the authority is almost ubiquitous here.
What happens to the phreatophytes?
Davis, the SNWA spokesman, says such worries are unfounded. "We are subject to an unprecedented level of restrictions and scrutiny," he insisted. "We're going to abide by the laws, not just in the letter, but in the spirit."
Davis is an expert public relations man, rarely flustered by those who disagree, but sometimes the staunch opposition still stuns him. "This idea of 'not one drop' isn't reasonable," he says.
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18 Comments
Add CommentAnother chapter added to the continuing saga of "Cadillac Desert" (Marc Reisner, 1986).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVoting for clean bills DO help.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFind better ways to clean water and make it drinkable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaking people accountable for the harm they have caused maybe the only way to change the trend to pollute without consequences.
Vote these people OUT.
Let them drink piss... Use the sun to evaporate the waste water for reuse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLas Vegas should get to tap their water ONLY when conservation measures have been maximized in the city proper. That means putting in landscaping that actually has a chance of survival on its own in Las Vegas' climate instead of having to be nursed almost daily by water coming in from hundreds of miles away. This also means closing most of the golf courses in the area as they are HUGE water wasters. Or, the least we could do is take the dimples off the golf balls so that a par 4 hole is only 200 yards long instead of 400. That's half the water consumption of golf courses right there only because we want to boost golfers' egos? Yeah, the people in White Pine county are going to get their water taken away because each golf course HAS to be 300+ acres...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLow-flow shower heads and toilets should be MANDATORY as well as waterless urinals and water-saving appliances. And please, stop using perfectly good water to fill up the Bellagio Fountain! After all these improvements, Las Vegas can pipe in more water (if they still need it at all).
This story represented both sides well, but failed to mention two very important (and factual!) points. One is that with the relatively pain-free conservation measures already in place, Las Vegas (my town!) uses just two-thirds of its allocation from the Colorado River, and even if there were to be significant drought or climate-related reducations, we have a huge buffer. (More conservation, which is opposed by SNWA, would only make us more secure.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSecondly, and of a more nefarious nature, the SNWA has invested many millions in the development and promotion of a $200-billion "new town" in the desert called Coyote Springs. (Why a municipal agency would generously contribute to such an effort should be the subject of more investigation.) Coyote Springs, an hour's drive north of Las Vegas in what is now virgin desert, was designed to have 159,000 homes and would be the second-largest city in Nevada. And according to the SNWA boss Pat Mulroy, it cannot exist without the pipeline. The water is irrelevent except as an excuse to build the pipeline. The developer would essentially rent space in the pipeline to move his water around hundreds of miles of the state to support this project, which I believe is the worst example of leapfrog development in the country.
So that's some insight into the ugly sausage factory that is water policy in the West.
It does not require any real expertise in the area of hydrology to estimate the amount of time needed to complete a water gathering and transport project such as this. Given this thought, it would not be a stretch to further estimate the number of dead individuals here today who are promising "no worries". These ever optimistic persons who will not be around to see the havoc wreaked by this project should; first acknowledge that they will no longer be around to witness the results of their efforts and second, having done so should sign away all rights for any of their descendants to have a life. All of these descendants should know that regardless of the passage of time, as soon as it becomes known that the trespasses of their forefathers/mothers is destroying innocent lives/livings that theirs is forfeit. Hopefully by wiping out whole genealogical lines of environmental terrorist we may save the earth yet. We can do with out Las Vegas......if not move it to Michigan lock stock and barrel....they have the room, the water and they need the jobs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI fear that this story is indicative of the dilemmas that face the entire human race in the rather near future. We can do all manner of mental somersaults, back-flips and rationalizations but the bottom line is that if we as a species cannot arrest our compulsion to multiply without restraint, nature will damned well do it for us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRancher Anderson got it right about who is going to raise the cows to put the prime rib on the tables at the casinos, or even at our local groceries. This global experiment that we have pushed far beyond our ability to control, climate change, will play out now beyond our ability to stop it.
We can conserve all that we can manage and desalinize the entire oceans but we will, in the end, kill the planet as a habitable place for advanced life forms -- unless we can achieve a steady state with the Earth's resources and survive the centuries, even millennia, needed to reach a new equilibrium.
Las Vegas may be proud of recycling 25,000 acre-feet of water over several years, but it is pathetic pissing in the ocean.
These grandiose Chamber of Commerce schemes for harvesting distant resources can only succeed for a matter of decades before they fail leaving long term ruin as their legacy.
Mark Twain had it right: "Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over." Unless we take a very long term approach to water, energy and management of all non-renewable resources we are doomed unless we abandon the perpetual growth model which our race has embraced since the very beginning of the industrial revolution. The discovery of The New World has only given us a reprieve of a few centuries fellow humans.
What no one in the US seems to know is that there now exists a solution to this problem. A new design of SOLAR FLASH EVAPORATOR CALLED FLOSTIL (see website SOLAQUA.INFO)was invented in 2010.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis solar driven plant will desalinate the salt ground water that exists in many areas of the US provided it can be pumped and it is in a hot sunny place.
PLEASE TELL EVERYONE YOU CAN ABOUT THIS BECAUSE I'M TIRED OF TELLING PEOPLE IN THE STATES. All the contact information is on the website.
I'm sure that clever, efficient solar means of distilling saline water from either the ocean or saline aquifers can be devised and to some extent exists now. However, there are still problems. One is: can it be scaled up to the demands of a major metropolis, agriculture and the superfluity of golf courses that have been built in the last few decades? Another serious problem which can only be swept under the rug for a few decades is: what do we do with all the salt?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe will eventually be forced to live within the means of our damaged planet and let's hope we don't crap it up beyond repair.
No. You may *not* have a pipeline from Lake Michigan to Las Vegas! Not as long as you have 21 golf courses and the abomination of the Fountains of Bellagio!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou got too many people -- send some home. Turn off the fountain and admit grass doesn't belong in the desert.
Then we'll talk. About bottled water at $2 per bottle,
We conserve. Now, it's your turn.
It's funny but sad-here on our small and damp island on the east side of the Atlantic, we have similar problems-the overpopulated,rich South relies on decreasing aquifers,and yet in the North we are,as usual at this time of year,up to our ankles in flood water!Simples-don't expand your towns or cities if there aren't the resources to support them.In perspective our local city(York)has been coping with these problems for the best part of the last 2000(YES 2000)years!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisToo right,Quinn, the waste of potable water in western civilisation is appaling
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLook, Las Vegas can afford to pay California to build a desal plant(s), and the pipe(s) to get it to them...and by the way West Texas better think about doing the same thing from the gulf. Then, what to do about Arizona and New Mexico...who knows....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFLOSTIL is made up of stainless steel and borosilicate modules bolted together in such a way that it makes any amount of fresh water desired.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe basic plant makes 1,000 tons a day.
The plant costs about the same as a large windmill power generator.
FLOSTIL could transform any hot desert coastline by converting ocean water to fresh in huge quantities.
The plant has no moving parts and is very rugged with an expected maintenance free life of more than 30 years.
The basic plant covers the same area as a football pitch and saves the salt as a dry product for sale.
Look at SOLAQUA.INFO for more information. The world could have a new green belt occupying what is now desert coastline in California, Texas, Mexico, Florida, North Africa, Middle East, India, China, Australia, South Africa. These places could become the grain basket for the world.
The FLOSTIL plant saves the salt as a dry product for sale on the world market.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUSA and Canada import 2 million tons of salt every year and pay about $100 a ton just to throw on the roads each winter. In the spring this salt is washed into the earth where it used to be millions of years ago before it was washed to the oceans by rivers.
YES The Flostil design will give practically unlimited yields. The flostil design is totally modular, made of ''forever'' materials stainless steel and glass and new modular lines can be added at any time to give as much fresh water as is desired. We can turn the grand canyon into a boating lake if you want!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you realise that all the rivers and lakes in the world only contain 0.1% of the worlds water it gives an idea of the vast resource available to us.(97% is in the oceans,2.7% is in the ice caps and 0.2% is underground.)
One of the great new features of the Flostil design is that it saves the salt as a dry product! This can be shipped to the northern states and Canada for winter road use. In the spring the rain washes the salt into the ground where it was millions of years ago before it was washed to the sea.
USA and Canada spend $2 billion on salt imports every year for the roads.
Any more questions ? I would be delighted to answer them personally.
Look at SOLAQUA.INFO for all contact details or email me barrycoots@gmail.com
The design was done in response to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EARTH 3 ISSUE IN 2009 which said ''The person who invented a way of desalinating seawater at little or no cost could become the world's richest person and be forever enshrined''.
I applied to their competition but I don't live in any of the 50 states so my entry was rejected.
Luckily the OXFORD UNIVERSITY VENTUREFEST awarded me the silver medal for the best invention of the year.
FLOSTIL saves the salt as a dry product so it can be swept under the carpet should you wish to do so but better spread on the roads in northern USA and Canada (salt to the value of $2 billion is imported each year for this).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSpring rains wash the salt into the ground where it was millions of years ago before rivers took it to the ocean.
A basic FLOSTIL plant covers an area about the same as a football pitch because it uses DIRECT SOLAR GAIN and gives 1,000 tons a day.
It is completely modular and can be scaled up at any time to yield any amount of fresh water you like.
You can see lots of detail on my website solaqua.info
There are millions of children in Africa that die every year from drinking shitty water.
I have a single line design that is fed manually using a six fold tandem.
The boys of the village pedal at night to fill the header tanks and the women of the village control the plant during the day.
These poor mothers have to take a ten mile hike in the fierce sun for two gallons of shitty water to give the children.
It doesn't have to be like this.