The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 150

feed Colorado River tributaries—stood at about 70 percent of average, which did not
portend well.
If the drought does not break, and Lake Mead's water level dips below the critical
dead-pool level of 1,050 feet, the consequences for Las Vegas, and much of the West,
could be catastrophic. But few people actually want to see Las Vegas dry up and blow
away, so if the Colorado River Basin hits critical lows, then Congress will likely come
to the rescue with federal assistance. Just what that might entail remains unanswered.
(Mulroy has suggested a “dramatic” replumbing of the nation's water system in which
Midwestern floodwater would be sent to the parched West, a subject I will return to
later.) Furthermore, the “hotel-casino complex,” as locals refer to Nevada's biggest busi-
nesses, is highly unlikely to allow Las Vegas to die of thirst. As Las Vegas mayor Oscar
Goodman succinctly put it, “The bottom line is that we'll never run out of water as long
as we can pay for it.”
Yet Mulroy worries that her opponents don't take the looming crisis seriously
enough. “People refuse to change their habits until they absolutely have to—which in
this case will be too late,” she insists. “We'll have no choice” but to build the in-state pro-
ject. But Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute, disagrees: “Rather than looking outward
to take water from rural counties, Las Vegas could look inward and figure out how to
use water more effectively.”
The threat that a major city could be relinquished to the dust, heat, and tumbleweeds
has proven sufficiently apocalyptic to spur a search for creative new solutions to
drought.
In 2005, well before the Great Basin court ruling, Pat Mulroy announced that de-
salination, the purification of salty or otherwise dirty water for drinking, would play
a significant role in Nevada's future. But with further study, Mulroy conceded that the
plan was technically and politically complex and in the end let Nevada dependent on
the overextended Colorado. She later said that while desal remains a viable option , “one
tool in the toolbox,” it is not a solution.
In a 2007 agreement between the Department of Interior and the seven Colorado
Basin states, a new set of guidelines was established on how to share the Colorado River
in case of extreme drought. If Lake Mead drops to an elevation of 1,075 feet above sea
level, the first “shortage declaration” will be triggered, which will cut water deliveries
to Nevada by thirteen thousand acre-feet a year, or enough water to supply twenty-six
thousand average Clark County homes. (Arizona would be shorted more than ten times
that amount.)
To buy time, the SNWA has initiated a series of stopgap remedies. By 2014, the
agency hopes to have completed a “ third straw , ” a new pipeline, that will reach deeper
into Lake Mead than the two existing pipes, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. It has