The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 145

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 hun-
dred 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 im-
plication 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