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April 12th, 2009
Via Time, an interesting article on the further developing water conflicts in the southwest U.S., namely between a thirsty Las Vegas and communities to the north. As the article notes:
“The valley below Nevada’s Snake mountains should not have much to fear from Las Vegas. Its dun-colored terrain daubed with the green of shrubs, meadow grasses and crops lies some 200 miles north of the roaring, metastasizing metropolis for which the state is most famous. But the 1.7 million people of greater Las Vegas may have designs on the fewer than 1,000 people of Snake Valley–or rather, on their water.
As one of the fastest-growing population centers in the country, Las Vegas has a powerful thirst. Every month 5,000 to 7,000 newcomers arrive to retire or find jobs, meaning the already swollen population could double in 20 to 30 years. Though water-conservation measures have reduced the city’s annual consumption since 2002, they cannot contain such explosive growth. So Las Vegas has gone looking for its water farther from home.
The city started to move last year on earlier filings for groundwater rights in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties, setting off a water war that could be repeated across the parched but popular Southwest. Let the Las Vegans have their way, other Nevadans warn, and you could upset a complex web of aquifers that run as far away as California’s Death Valley and western Utah, where Snake Valley partly lies. That could do irreversible damage to plant, wildlife and human populations all sipping from the same limited supply. For every desert population center, there is a similarly limited supply of water and a similar potential for political warfare.
“There could be no more confrontational words [in this part of the country],” says Cecil Gardner, a rancher on the Utah side of the valley, “than ‘We’re going to take your water.'” But there should be ample water to go around, counters a composed Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, adding, “Where else exactly would they like us to go?”
That Las Vegas has real water woes can’t be denied. The city exceeded the capacity of its own groundwater field several decades ago, and currently is 90% dependent on a limited allotment from the Colorado River–an allotment it’s fast outgrowing. That is what has driven the city to petition for water rights in the outlying counties, but if the history of Western development has shown one thing, it’s that this kind of water shopping can go terribly awry. In the early part of the 20th century, Los Angeles famously–and secretly–bought up thousands of acres in California’s Owens Valley, then proceeded to drain away the surface and subsurface water. After decades of pumping, a dozen Owens Valley springs have dried up, and water tables in places are too low to support once abundant native grasses and shrubs. In the West that has become a cautionary tale. “We don’t want to be another Owens Valley,” says Denys Koyle, owner of the Border Inn, on the Nevada-Utah line.
To be sure, the battle over the water stores of rural Nevada is taking place in a very different era–one in which multiple boards and authorities must approve a water request, constraining a large urban center from bamboozling an unsuspecting rural population again. So Las Vegas must play by the rules, waiting until state and federal officials agree to its aquifer-tapping proposal. While water-authority representatives wait, the city has been busy reassuring everyone that its plan will be considerate of the land, with carefully monitored pumping that can be dialed back the moment evidence of harm comes to light. But in the desert there’s not a lot of margin for error, and a chronic water imbalance can be environmentally devastating. Robert Hershler, a taxonomist at the Smithsonian Institution, has combed through the biota of hundreds of springs in the Great Basin region, including Snake Valley, and has discovered more than 100 new species of spring snails, some of which are confined to a single location. “If their spring dries up, these snails are gone for good,” he observes. “They can never come back.”
Donald Sada, an ecologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., is also concerned. A slight decrease in the flow of groundwater will probably not be detrimental to the pockets of water that dot Western deserts, he says. The problem is, “What’s slight? At what point do we start to alter the functional ecology?” The loss of the diminutive snails, fish and other organisms that dwell in desert springs would be important to more than just ecologists and taxonomists. Those tiny animals are indicator species, the canaries in the environmental coal mine that provide the first warning that the whole system is coming unhinged. “When these organisms disappear,” says University of Michigan zoologist Gerald Smith, “it will signal the end of water quality and water permanence for humans in desert regions.”
Even if Las Vegas had not come calling, Great Basin water holes would be in trouble. Across the region, drought, agricultural diversions and overgrazing have done measurable damage, and there are examples in Snake Valley. “We’re worried about southern Nevada because we know what we’re doing to ourselves,” says rancher Dean Baker. “And that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what they’re talking about.”
Equally controversial plans could move beyond mere talk in other Western cities. A multiyear drought, which eased only this year, dropped water levels in the Colorado River’s vast reservoirs to historic lows, raising the specter of involuntary rationing. It was a shock that rattled water managers in numerous states, causing Denver, for example, to eye the headwaters of the Gunnison River, clear across the Continental Divide, and Los Angeles to consider exploiting a groundwater field in the Mojave Desert. These and other communities will thus be watching Las Vegas closely, as will environmentalists who question, among other things, how much water, if any, the city can take out of Snake Valley without doing harm.
That’s a question that could have a more authoritative answer in three years, when a team of federal and state hydrologists and geologists completes a large study of groundwater flow through the targeted region. By itself, collecting better data will not resolve the current conflict, but it’s a start. The more scientists learn about Nevada’s aquifer system, the more accurately they can model potential effects, and the more confidence the public in that state and elsewhere will have in the decisions the government agencies make. “When the water is gone, the future is gone,” observes rancher Dean Baker. That’s true not only for ranching families in Snake Valley but for families in the Las Vegas Valley as well.“