WATER POLITICS

Lower Colorado River Diversions

Between 2004 and 2013, the average flow of water from the Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream from the Lower Colorado River Basin, was 8.88 million acre- feet. From there, water was diverted to cities and farms in Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. By the time it reached Mexico, the flow was 1.55 million acre feet. This year, for the first time in decades, 1 percent of the annual flow was released to nourish the river’s long-dried delta.

Flow data for lower Colorado River for 2004-2013 courtesy Bureau of Reclamation

Between 2004 and 2013, the average flow of water from the Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream from the Lower Colorado River Basin, was 8.88 million acre- feet. From there, water was diverted to cities and farms in Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. By the time it reached Mexico, the flow was 1.55 million acre feet. This year, for the first time in decades, 1 percent of the annual flow was released to nourish the river’s long-dried delta.I pull on rubber boots, a hard hat, safety glasses, and an orange vest and follow Moonin past a wide berm of excavated rock and thousands of neatly stacked concrete slabs. We head up a dirt road toward the shaft that leads to the connector tunnel, and when we reach it I climb into the “birdcage.” The canary-yellow metal box clangs shut, and then a crane slowly begins to lower it 450 feet down the shaft. Inside, it’s immediately warmer and wetter. Water trickles down the walls. “We spend a lot of time fighting water because we’re below lake level,” Moonin says.

The birdcage touches down near a half dozen construction workers setting rebar, and I walk past them to peer into the connector tunnel. It slopes up slightly and curves to the right before tapering off into blackness. A hundred feet to the north, it links to the shore end of the Third Straw, and a mile and a half past that, the tunnel-boring machine continues its grinding march. The machine has now eaten more than halfway from the shoreline to its destination: the “soft eye” in the side of the riser set into the lake bed. In less than two years, if all goes well, water will fill the void where I’m standing and rush toward a pumping station at three feet per second.

I can’t help but admire the scale of the project. But it’s impossible to forget that this is also an act of desperation, a last-gasp attempt to keep water flowing from a river that at many spots has already become more a trickle than a torrent. Las Vegas and cities throughout the West continue to grow, and that’s prompted a race to build infrastructure faster than demand can make it obsolete.

From its headwaters in the Rockies, the Colorado River meanders 1,400 miles through five states and into Mexico, nourishing 40 million people and irrigating 5.5 million acres of farmland along the way. Despite decades of subsequent development, the water rights first established by the Colorado River Compact in 1922 remain essentially unchanged today. The agreement allocates 15 million acre-feet each year (picture an acre of land covered with a foot-high layer of water) among the seven Colorado River Basin states: Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California. The compact also acknowledged Mexico’s right to water, and in 1944, the nation was guaranteed 1.5 million acre-feet, bringing the total to 16.5 million. For many years, states rarely took all they were owed; currently, the river can’t come close to meeting demand.

We now know that these water rights were based on a grave misjudgment. “The Colorado River is grossly overallocated,” says Peter Gleick, a water expert with the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. “We’ve given away more water than nature provides.” The 16.5-million figure was based on just two decades of Colorado River flow. Over the century spanning from 1906 to 2005, the average freshwater in-put to the system was actually only 15 million acre-feet. So rather than fluctuating as reservoirs should, Gleick says, “we’ve been in a situation where they’re going down and down and down.” The federal Bureau of Reclamation has predicted that the water level at Lake Mead could fall below 1,075 feet of elevation as soon as January 2016, prompting automatic reductions in the states’ allocations.

Even more troubling, scientists have learned by studying tree rings that the 20th century was one of the two wettest 100-year periods in the past 1,200 years. There have been many extended droughts in the Southwest over the past two millennia, some lasting for three decades or more. The water shortages occuring today might not be an aberration but a return to a historical norm.

Climate change will only exacerbate the problem. Models predict that rainfall in the Colorado Basin could decrease by 15 percent in the next 50 years. “Even 10 percent is brutal,” says marine physicist Tim Barnett, of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. If climate change continues to dry out the region, Barnett found in a 2009 study, Colorado River water deliveries could fall short 60 to 90 percent of the time by midcentury. Warmer temperatures will also increase evaporation from surface water and reduce the natural reservoirs of mountain snowpack that provide a steady source of meltwater, especially in summer. Scientists can’t say how much climate change is influencing the current drought, and in a way, it doesn’t matter. They do know climate change is happening and that it will make droughts worse.

Many places are slow to prepare for such a future. This drought has been particularly severe in California, where agriculture accounts for 80 percent of all water use. Forty percent of the state’s farmland is regularly submerged by flood irrigation, and farmers grow crops (such as rice) more appropriate to a wetland environment. Many residents’ water bills will remain disconnected from their actual usage, eliminating any financial incentive to conserve, until a new state law goes into effect in 2025. In much of the West, people haven’t worried a whole lot about water since the last extended drought, in the mid-1980s. The same is not true in Las Vegas.

In just about every way, Las Vegas is more extreme than the typical American city. Take population. In 1989, the Las Vegas Valley was home to 700,000 residents. Today there are more than two million. While Los Angeles sees an average 15 inches of rain a year, Phoenix, 8, and Albuquerque, 9.5, Las Vegas receives just 4 inches annually. The average daily high in summer is 103?F. The region has virtually no agriculture and little industry. Instead, it has tourism: 40 million people a year who, when they land in the Mojave Desert, seek only an oasis—the dancing fountains of the Bellagio, the imitation Venetian canals, pirate ships, swimming pools, and golf courses.

Vegas’s appeal is excess, and that extends to water. In fact, it’s hard to find a spot on the Strip where you can’t hear water as well as see it. The fountain in front of the new 4,000-room Aria hotel is more modest than most: delicate sprays of water incorporating beams of color. I enter the soaring lobby to find Chris Magee. Water brought Magee to Vegas too—first on a college swimming scholarship, then as a lifeguard at a resort pool. Now he’s the executive director of sustainable facilities for MGM Resorts International, which owns the Aria as well as Mandalay Bay and other iconic Vegas properties.

“The way we look at it, there are two types of water: consumptive and nonconsumptive,” he says. Water used for landscaping is mostly consumptive; it evaporates or seeps into the ground. “The nonconsumptive is everything that we capture back. Almost every drop of water that goes into a drain gets back into Lake Mead.” We weave through the casino and take an elevator up a few dozen floors to a luxury suite, where Magee points out low-flow fixtures and appliances. Here, and in every hotel room and home in the city, the wastewater from each shower, laundry load, and, yes, toilet flush is piped to a treatment plant, cleaned, and then spit out down a natural wash and back into Lake Mead. Once it rejoins reservoir water, it can flow back into the intake pipes to be treated and sent out city taps again. Almost half the water Las Vegas consumes now returns to the lake.

The rock beneath the lake is porous.Groundwater seeps in from the sides, and lake water threatens to flood the chamber from above.

Magee escorts me out, past spiky cacti and Seuss-like succulents. “Ten years ago, I don’t think anyone would have ever thought you’d find desert landscaping around a large hotel- casino development,” he says. Because homeowners use almost 70 percent of their water outside, their property, too, has been targeted for mandatory desert makeovers. Robert Kern is one of the water cops (officially, investigators) employed to patrol neighborhoods looking for cheats. When I meet Kern to accompany him on rounds, it’s hard to imagine him getting into even a mild confrontation. His soft, open face and quick smile make him seem more like a friendly mailman.

“This time of year, residents are only allowed to water one day a week,” he says, steering his pickup into a neighborhood of older single-family homes. Kern often follows tips from neighbors. People are self-conscious about water use, he says, and they know the regulations. “It’s everywhere: on their bill, online, on TV. The neighborhoods are policing themselves.” When this development was built, every home had a front and back lawn, Kern says. Not anymore. “Grass takes 55 gallons of water per square foot a year. A water-efficient yard might use 8 to 10 gallons.”

Drawing Straws

Las Vegas’s first two water tunnels cut through a spit of land called Saddle Island. The third extends three miles toward a deeper point in Lake Mead.

Lake Mead water data courtesy Bureau Of Reclamation. Locations of intakes courtesy Southern Nevada Water Authority

Las Vegas began ticketing errant water users in 2002, the driest year in recorded history on the Colorado River. The city now pays residents $1.50 a square foot to replace turf with desert landscaping. New developments can have grass on only half of a backyard’s square footage—and none in front. New commercial properties are banned from using ornamental grass. The median down the Las Vegas Strip, in fact, is made of synthetic turf.

As Kern drives, he keeps his eyes on the gutters. When he sees water, he follows it to its source. We track one rivulet to a single-story home made of pink stucco. There’s a date palm in the front yard, but the rest is all flat, green grass. This is the wrong day for watering, but the sprinklers are going full force, with misdirected nozzles spraying directly onto the sidewalk. Kern jumps out of the truck with a clipboard and video camera and documents the scene. A homeowner gets two warnings, he says. The first fine is $80. Then it doubles, up to $1,280 for a fifth violation. The fee appears as a line item on the water bill. “They can contest,” he says, “but in every case, there’s a video.”

Since 2002, Las Vegas has cut its water use by a third, from 314 gallons per capita a day to 212. There’s plenty more that could be done. Water remains remarkably cheap, for example: $1.16 per thousand gallons of water for the first tier of usage. I pay about three times that much for the same Colorado River water in Los Angeles. Las Vegas is in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a drought, in the midst of a population boom driven by retirees who want to replicate their East Coast gardens in the Mojave. Still, when greater shortages come, the city may fare relatively well. The Third Straw is a key component of that insurance policy.

Scooping out the Third Straw is like digging a subway tunnel, but with a significant added challenge: “It’s the highest-pressure tunnel excavated in the world to date,” Moonin says. The bedrock beneath the lake is porous; groundwater seeps in from the sides, and lake water threatens to flood the chamber from above. Inside the connector tunnel, sandbags separate a foot-and-a-half-deep river of water from the active construction zone; each minute, pumps push 1,450 gallons to the surface. The water problems in the main intake tunnel are far worse: When excavation first started, the workers had to wear full rain gear.

Since it broke ground six years ago, the $817-million project has been beleaguered by delays and cost overruns. In 2010, workers hit a fault zone, which caused flooding and forced engineers to reposition the tunnel at great expense. In 2012, a 44-year-old construction worker was killed and another injured by a high-pressure stream of mortar, which was released when a section of concrete came loose from the tunnel wall. For the past two years the tunnel-boring machine has alternated between atmospheric mode and pressurized mode, which requires the cutter head to pressurize a pocket of air at the rock face to keep water from forcing its way through. So far it’s encountered 14.5 bars of hydrostatic pressure.

Progress has been slow. Since tunneling for Intake No. 3 began in 2012, the borer has averaged just 35 feet per day in atmospheric mode. Pressurized mode advances as few as five feet a day. If construction finishes in July 2015, as it is now hoped, the project will be three years behind schedule. Of course, further delays are possible, if not likely. It still has more than a mile to go.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, meanwhile, is working on an even more audacious Plan B: a 250-mile, $3 billion overland pipeline that would carry water from aquifers in the state’s rural eastern valleys to Las Vegas. First proposed 30 years ago, it remains mired in lawsuits. Construction is still at least a decade out.

The Driest Spell

Lake Mead’s water level has fluctuated since the reservoir first formed, but the current 14-year drought is unprecedented. At 1,075 feet, shortage conditions take effect, reducing allocations to southwestern states.

Lake Mead water data courtesy Bureau of Reclamation