The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 139

Lasvegasis 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 val-
ley. 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 sprink-
lers 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 Sum-
mer 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 thunder-
ing 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 man-
ages 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 cer-
tain: 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 res-
idents, 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.