[quote=FlyerInHi][quote=DataAgent]I like Las Vegas too. It has huge growth potential.
However, the water situation in Las Vegas seems quite bleak. Millions of people (and growing) depend on Lake Mead for water. The ‘third straw’ could literally drain Lake Mead like a bathtub. How long till that bathtub empties?[/quote]
The third straw at the bottom of lake mead actually gives Vegas priority over the water ahead of California, Arizona and Mexico. It does not draw more water but it’s insurance iin case water levels continue to drop.
BLM will auction more land in the south 15 almost all the way to Primm. So sprawl continues unabated. A lot of middle to high end housing. No affordable housing so rents continue to rise at the bottom.
Even UNLV will build market rate “luxury” housing on its land.[/quote]
I’ve been following the topic of climate change ever since I was a student at UCSD back in the late 80’s and early 90’s where I learned drought in the region can last longer than a human life time AND that there have been two long term drought events that happened in the past 1200 years,… which in geological time, is akin to a blink of an eye
[quote]
The American Southwest: Are We Running Dry?
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So its not out of the realm of possibility that another century long drought happens AND the key indicator to watch is the water level and “trend” line
[quote] Falling Lake Mead Water Levels Prompt Detente in Arizona Feud
The Colorado River, which supplies water to 40 million people from Denver to Los Angeles, has been gripped in the driest 19-year period on record, according to officials from the Bureau of Reclamation, a multistate agency that manages water and power in the West. With low snowpack and warm conditions again, runoff from the river this year is only about 40% of the long-term average, prompting renewed concerns over the water level in Lake Mead.
The risk of the reservoir falling below 1,025 feet by the year 2026—a level once thought unthinkable—has risen to 40%, according to new estimates by the Bureau of Reclamation. Because the lake is funnel shaped, water officials worry it could decline even faster once it gets that low—triggering even bigger cutbacks.
Arizona, Nevada and California in 2007 had agreed to undertake a series of cuts from the river, under Interior Department guidelines for when Lake Mead dipped below 1,075 feet. For example, Arizona, which has the lowest water rights on the system, agreed to curtail roughly one third its annual use, or 320,000 acre feet. (An acre foot is the amount of water used by an average family of five in a year.)
The intensity of heat and drought since then has prompted the states to prepare the new drought plans, to leave more of their water in the reservoir. Arizona, for example, would under the new plan instead reduce its use by 512,000 acre feet.
“It’s hard to understate how big of a haircut that is,” said Drew Beckwith, water policy manager at Western Resource Advocates, an environmental advocacy group in Boulder, Colo. “The challenge for Arizona is who within Arizona is going to be taking the cuts.”
[quote] …People who worry about those issues sometimes focus their scorn on Las Vegas, which appears culpable mainly because, of all the cities that draw water from the river, it lies the closest to its banks. But, in actuality, Nevada was so thinly populated when the river was divided up that its allotment is very small—just two per cent of the total—and it actually takes less than that, primarily because Las Vegas has some of most stringent water-conservation regulations in the country.
…Just as proximity makes people think that Las Vegas is the principal cause of the decline of Lake Mead, it also makes them think that any further decline in the lake will be a problem mainly, or even only, for Las Vegas. But that isn’t true, either. When the pumping plant for the third straw is completed, Nevada will be the only lower-basin user with the infrastructure required to draw lake water from below the level known as “dead pool”—roughly nine hundred feet above sea level, the elevation of the lowest openings in the four intake towers on the upstream side of Hoover Dam. Approximately a quarter of the water remaining in Mead is below that dead-pool line and, therefore, untappable by users below the dam. The chance that the lake will drop that far anytime soon is small—it’s more than a hundred and eighty feet below the current surface—but in 1998 few people thought the lake would ever drop to where it is today.
“If Mead falls to nine hundred,” Mulroy continued, “nothing goes downstream from Hoover Dam.” That would mean that the river’s two largest users, Arizona and California, would get nothing, and some of the most productive agricultural land in the country would turn back into desert. “But Southern Nevada will still be taking water out of the lake, because the new intake is at eight-sixty”—eight hundred and sixty feet above sea level, forty feet below the lowest Hoover intake.
