The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 143

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 recor-
ded 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 im-
pounds 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 envir-
onmental 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?
AN “INSURANCE POLICY”
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 snow-
melt, 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 Ve-
gas could tap into the aquifers beneath the sparsely inhabited valleys of the Great Bas-
in 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 min-
ing,” he reminded Katzer, according to the LasVegasSun. Water mining, pumping wa-
ter faster than it is replenished, is illegal in Nevada. The Great Basin's porous limestone