The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 138

“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 lim-
it the city's growth or raise water rates or conserve water more aggressively, as many out-
side 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 or-
ganized coalition of sportsmen, environmentalists, endangered-species regulators, In-
dian 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 im-
portant 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.”
DOUBLE PLUMBING TREASURE ISLAND
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 re-
ceives 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 al-
ways that way.