More on where the Bellagio fountain gets its water

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The Dunes

The Dunes

My post last week on the Bellagio fountain and the fact that it got its water from wells originally drilled to water an old golf course drew questions. Today, we have answers.

Jeffrey Prest asks: “What was the name of the old golf course?”

Doug Bennett at the Southern Nevada Water Authority shared this old postcard of the Dunes Hotel and the golf course behind it, which Doug says stretched from Tropicana Ave. to Flamingo Rd.

David Zetland observed: “I thought it was saline g/w, i.e., ‘useless’ for drinking but not for display…”

Doug explains:

The fountains at Bellagio are fed using well water for which the Dunes already had a long-standing permit from the State of Nevada. The fountains do not use municipal water. It is my understanding that the water is not of suitable quality to go straight to the fountain and that Bellagio treats it first. The Bellagio Hotel and fountain uses much less water than the golf course did and produces substantially more economic return, as you pointed out in your presentation. Similarly, the Wynn Hotel, built on the site of the old Desert Inn, also used well water conserved by a redesign of the old golf course to meet the needs of their landscape and water feature.

And now, my full confession, which may require me to turn in my Western Water Wonks membership card: I love the Bellagio fountain.

 

A half-hearted defense of the New York Times decision to kill the green blog

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I’ve been a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists for a number of years, but every year when my renewal notice comes up I wrestle anew with the membership and the label it entails.*

I’m a journalist who covers topics that are sometimes labeled “environmental”, but I’m not sure how to define the subject area other than by listing the things that fit within it. With some notable exceptions, I don’t really care much about water pollution or air pollution, for example. I write a lot about climate change because water. I write some about forests because fires, towers of smoke billowing over my community, jarred me. I’m pretty diligent about covering one endangered species, but ignore most others. I know I’m supposed to care about this Keystone pipeline because people who care a lot about the “environment” have placed it on the agenda, but it’s not on mine. Roadless rules and wilderness just don’t interest me journalistically. I pretty much bought the Nordhuas and Shellenberger argument (pdf) because the category they were killing off wasn’t working for me.

So I’m sympathetic here to Dean Baquet at the New York Times as he explains the reasons for killing off the newspaper’s Green blog:

“I think our environmental coverage has suffered from the segregation — it needs to be more integrated into all of the different areas,” like science, politics and foreign news, he said.

He agreed that environmental coverage is of great importance, and said that having The Times’s environmental reporters working on other desks is the best way to “drive more of these important stories onto the home page and the front page.”

A Green blog is a place where environmenty people go to look for environmenty news. If we’re doing it right, that sort of news is embedded in all sorts of stories rather than a category of its own. So I agree with the rationale – both for killing the Green blog and for dismantling the Times’ green pod. I think coverage of the family of issues sometimes called the “environment beat” is best done integrated into a bunch of different beats, not off on its own.

But I called this a “half-hearted defense” because it only works if Baquet and company aren’t bullshitting us here, if they’re really planning to drive the topic(s) out into the newsroom as a whole.

* Every year I re-up because, as Lissa reminded me this morning, it’s a great organization, and I have a lot in common with the other members.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere – Anthropocene diaries: how much water for the minnow?

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From the morning paper, the latest in the struggle to figure out how much water the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow needs:

According to an analysis by the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, the river has only once since the 1990s, in 2005, had enough water to meet the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “conservation objective” for spring runoff high enough to help the endangered minnow’s population recover.

The gap between flow goals and the reality of dry-year flows on the river has led to high-level negotiations among the federal agencies trying to manage the Rio Grande, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.

 

landmark Arizona-Nevada water deal coming to an end

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The agreement between the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas)  and the Arizona Water Banking Authority, under which Arizona banked water for Nevada, has always seemed to me like a harbinger of the future in the Colorado River Basin – mutually beneficial sharing across state borders. Via Juliet McKenna and Michele Robertson, it now appears that it’s more a thing of the past. But with some lessons learned:

[T]he parties are now looking to terminate future water banking obligations. Lessons from the past are not forgotten, however; the new draft agreement provides the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions. In fact, the parties can agree to resume storage at any point in the future. This adaptive approach will be important to managing the Colorado River as both states grapple with the potential impacts of climate change and future population growth.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Real water, real people, Maxwell NM edition

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oops, update, forgot link

Journal photographer Robert Rosales and I recently visited Maxwell, NM, which I describe (I think safely, though how does one know for sure?) as having “arguably the most serious drought-driven municipal water supply problem in the state of New Mexico.”

From the story:

Asked about the burden she bears in trying to find the water to keep her village alive, Pinkston chafed at the word “burden.” What would she call it? “A responsibility,” she said.

Whatever the word, Pinkston is clear about what is at stake.

“People would just have to move if there’s no water,” she said. “We’d be a ghost town.”

Where the Bellagio Fountain’s water comes from

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Bellagio Fountain

I’ve been getting this wrong.

The water in the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas does not come from recycled sewage:

The Bellagio fountains are mostly using well water that exists beneath the Bellagio landscape. That well water was used previously to maintain a golf course that previously existed there. The beauty of that is the current water use, because of the lake, represents only two-thirds of the water that was used before when the golf course existed, so in reality, the Bellagio uses less water than the golf course that use to be there before.

(I got it wrong in a talk I gave this morning, and a gentleman who knows Vegas water kindly corrected me in the hall after.)

 

The risks of risk communication

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[A]n informed and properly motivated risk communicator would proceed deliberately and cautiously. In particular, because efforts to quiet public fears about vaccines will predictably create some level of exactly that fear, such a communicator will not engage in a high-profile, sustained campaign to “reassure” the general public that vaccines are safe without reason to believe that there is a meaningful level of concern about vaccine risks in the public generally.

That’s Dan Kahan, pointing out the need to tread carefully in risk communication because of the danger of reinforcing that which you’re trying to debunk.

In the eastern Mediterranean, tree rings tell of a shift toward stand-replacing fire?

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In a Greek forest, tree rings telling a familiar story – a history of surface fire, but a trend toward much more destructive blazes:

the size of the area burned as well as the type of fire seem to have changed, with the 2007 event being the most extended crown fire encountered so far. Our study has provided additional evidence that P.nigra is indeed a fire-resistant tree species provided that it is exposed to surface fires, even if they are recurrently occurring. Shifts from this pattern may lead to local extirpation of the species, as in the case of severe and extended crown fires.

Interested in learning more on the use of tree rings in science? I’ve got a book for you.

 

Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere

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A forest burns down. Humans rescue fish, keep ’em alive in an Albuquerque warehouse. Maybe 80 years before the drainage that feeds their forest creek recovers. Maybe 200. This is life in the anthropocene:

Angela James’ fish tanks don’t look much like Whiskey Creek.

But for 68 imperiled Gila trout, the tanks in a northeast Albuquerque warehouse will have to do for now. After last year’s Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico, Whiskey Creek itself doesn’t look much like Whiskey Creek anymore.

“I refer to it as a halfway house,” said James, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as she prepared a breakfast of frozen bloodworms for her guests.

Insanely cool new evapotranspiration maps from USGS team

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Evapotranspiration is the combination of water evaporated from soil, surface water, etc., and water transpired from the leaves of plants. It’s an incredibly important measure of what’s going on in the hydrologic system. Which is why I love this new map:

US Evapotranspiration, from Sanford and Selnick

US Evapotranspiration, from Sanford and Selnick

From Estimation of Evapotranspiration Across the Conterminous United States Using a Regression With Climate and Land-Cover Data, Sanford and Selnick, Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Volume 49, Issue 1