Vegas: Hey, it’s not our fault Lake Mead is dropping!
This image depicting a years’ worth of Colorado River water use, from an emailer I got from the Southern Nevada Water Authority:
Archive of posts filed under the Oh Vegas category.
Resilience, and pulling the cap on the new Las Vegas Lake Mead intake
Southern Nevada Water Authority crews pulled the end cap off of the agency’s new, deeper Lake Mead intake today, and by this weekend they’ll be pumping water from the new system. This is a major milestone in a system that, when completed, provides critical water management breathing room for the entire Colorado River Basin. Theorists of …
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Fleck’s water news, Vegas edition
I broke the first rule of something or another by reading the comments on this week’s Las Vegas water news stories. Yowza. More in my latest water newsletter. As always, you can subscribe to the newsletter here.
Las Vegas to help out Southern California with 150,000 acre feet of Colorado River water
The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s board will take up a proposal this Thursday to ship 150,000 acre feet of Las Vegas’s unused Colorado River water to Southern California to help out during California’s epic drought. The water will help the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California make up for shortfalls in its supplies from Northern …
The Las Vegas water conservation model
Sammy Roth, a reporter for the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, took a trip this month to Las Vegas to share with his California readers how they do the water conservation thing in urban Nevada: When it comes to saving water, Sin City has the Coachella Valley beat. Las Vegas can credit its water frugality …
The Economist gives Las Vegas points for water management
The notion of using “Las Vegas” and “sustainable” in the same sentence might give a lot of westerners the heebee jeebees, but there’s an interesting case to be made that its water management decisions over the last decade have pointed it in that direction. The Economist, in a look at Vegas water performance in its …
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Lower Colorado shortage now unlikely in 2016, maybe not in 2017
Our big wet May looks to have all but eliminated the possibility of a Lower Colorado River Basin shortage in 2016, and it now looks like a better than 50-50 chance we won’t have one in 2017 either, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly outlook, published this afternoon (pdf). A shortage is triggered if …
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As Lake Mead drops, who is really vulnerable?
As Lake Mead drops toward a Lower Colorado River Basin shortage declaration, a group of UC Santa Barbara students have done an excellent analysis (pdf of their summary results) that shows where the real vulnerabilities are. They conclude that Las Vegas and the municipal areas of Central Arizona are on solid ground. Arizona farmers won’t …
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Why Lake Mead could drop an extra 15 feet next year, and shortage could be more likely than we expect
While we’ve all been obsessing over the elevation of Lake Mead, there’s a second looming lake elevation problem that could really complicate Colorado River management and increases the risk of a 2016 Arizona shortage declaration beyond the current estimates. Depending on how things play out over the next couple of months, this second problem could …
My life becomes self-parody
In Las Vegas for a two-day conference on the Colorado River law and policy. Checked into my hotel room, looked out the window to see the Bellagio Fountains: My life has become self-parody.