Nevada to suck down "California's" water

Welcome to Lake Mead.

Suck That Water Down

• We keep importing millions and millions of new legal and illegal foreigners into the desert communities of California, Nevada and Arizona.
• Now Las Vegas is making plans to keep sucking dry Lake Mead even after water levels drop into the danger zone.  

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Facing dwindling water supplies, Western states are struggling to capture every drop with dam and diversion projects that some think could erode regional cooperation crucial to managing the scarce resource.

Against that backdrop, eight Western governors meeting in Las Vegas this weekend will address regional water issues, and water managers from seven states arrive next week to work on ways to ensure 40 million people in the parched Colorado River basin don't go thirsty.

Gary Wockner, a conservationist with the Denver-based advocacy group Save the Colorado, said there's already jostling amid the fear of empty buckets. "Everyone is trying to get the last legal drop of water," he said.

A view of Lake Mead in the distance behind boats in dry dock near
where the Lake Mead Marina was once located.

"Diversions extract water from the system," said Jack Schmidt, professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University. He just completed three years studying the Grand Canyon for the U.S. Geological Survey. "More water use and more water retention in the upper basin means less water flowing through the Grand Canyon to the lower basin."

Schmidt referred to the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and agreements with Mexico that promise about 16.5 million acre-feet of water annually from a river system that has historically taken in about 15 million acre-feet from rainfall and snowmelt. But that amount has diminished during almost 15 years of drought. One acre-foot of water is about enough to serve two average Las Vegas homes for a year.

"You could say that we decided how to divide the pie, but the pie is smaller than anybody thought," Schmidt said. "With climate change, it is even smaller than that."

In Las Vegas, which virtually relies on water from Lake Mead, officials are making plans to add a $650 million pumping facility to draw from the reservoir even if levels drop below 1,000 feet above sea level. That's the line at which Hoover Dam's hydroelectric turbines would be idled.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority already is drilling an $800 million tunnel to tap water from the bottom of the lake, at 860 feet above sea level.

At 900 feet — so-called "dead pool" — the river would end at Hoover Dam. Nothing would flow downstream.

The lake reached its high water mark in 1983 at 1,225 feet.

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A Las Vegas neighborhood..
It's not rain but population
Las Vegas or Los Angeles it does not matter.  We continue to build and add millions of new people with no thought as to where the water will come from.  After all, water "magically" joust pours out of the tap on command. Never mind that we live in a desert.
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LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

A community advisory committee is recommending a new $650 million water project — and a rate hike to pay for it — to secure the Las Vegas Valley’s water supply even under a worst case scenario at Lake Mead.

The proposed pumping station would allow the Southern Nevada Water Authority to keep drawing from the lake should it shrink to “dead pool,” a once-unthinkable low point at which Hoover Dam can no longer release water.

Since 2000, the surface of Lake Mead has dropped about 130 feet amid record drought on the over-appropriated Colorado River. Since dipping to a new record low in August, the water level has gone back up by 4 feet, but current projections call for the lake to fall back into record territory in April.

Right now, the surface of the lake sits at about 1,084 feet above sea level. The intake pipes and pumps currently used to supply the valley with about 90 percent of its water will stop working should the lake drop another 85 feet.

The dead-pool level, at which Hoover Dam can no longer release water downstream, is at about 900 feet above sea level. The proposed Intake Pump Station 3 would allow the water authority to keep drawing from the lake down to about 870 feet above sea level, though there would be little left of the lake under such a doomsday scenario.   Read More . . . .