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WATER POLITICS

Via The Las Vegas Sun, an interesting look at Pat Mulroy of the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the actions that Las Vegas has taken to secure water supplies. As the article notes:

“…Water is fuel. Without it, runaway growth across the Southwest would not be possible. To witness what cheap, federally subsidized water out of the Colorado River can do, look at the urbanization of Southern California, served by the Metropolitan Water District. Where once they grew oranges, lemons and limes, they now grow houses and freeways.

None of it was possible on the roughly 500,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water left over for Southern California cities after farmers took their 3.85 million-acre-foot share. It was possible only because California was enjoying water unclaimed by the four Northern Basin states — New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. The Metropolitan Water District proved unmatched in the Lower Basin in glomming onto the surplus, as much as 800,000 acre-feet a year.

Combined with water drawn from the Sierra and another vast siphon from Sacramento to Los Angeles, the endless suburbs of Southern California were sucking up so much water that the runoff into the Pacific from lawn sprinklers and car washing alone reached an estimated 1 million acre-feet a year.

That was more than three times the Colorado River allocation for all of Southern Nevada, enough potable water for 2 million families, rushing through the gutters of greater Los Angeles and sweeping cigarette butts and motor oil out to sea.

Nevada wanted what California was wasting, so, Bunker says, “we had to do some surgery.”

In 1992, that meant lobbying new Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona. Before taking office, Babbitt had been so opposed to Las Vegas’ ground-water applications that he had offered legal advice to rural Nevadans protesting the pipeline.

But like any Arizonan, Babbitt was also a natural ally of Las Vegas in any drive to curb California excess.

By the time Babbitt left office in 2001, Nevada had been so successful in bringing California’s draw on the river back into line that even President Bush’s new interior secretary adopted the Babbitt policy.

Mulroy did not stop there. Ferocious in search of water, she executed trades so complex that in 2006 even the state engineer’s panel of professional water people had trouble following them. A sample:

• She struck a massive water-banking deal with Arizona, paying Arizona to store unused water in its aquifer and allowing Las Vegas to withdraw the difference from Lake Mead.

• She bought up historic, pre-Colorado Compact water rights on the Virgin and Muddy rivers, both Colorado River tributaries.

• She moved with Arizona and California to have a reservoir built that will prevent Mexico from receiving more Colorado River water than it is allocated, and secured the right to draw some of the saved water from Lake Mead.

But the biggest, most potentially valuable supply of water in the Las Vegas water plan was still the vast pool underlying the Great Basin.

• • •

The Great Basin got its name because the region doesn’t drain to the sea. Extending from Death Valley to Salt Lake, it amounts to a 200,000-square-mile bowl engulfed by mountainous walls — the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range to the West and the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau to the East. It contains most of Nevada, a slice of Northern California, a small topping from Oregon and roughly half of Utah.

The topography is classic Western basin and range and, for all its beauty, it’s a prehistoric accident scene.

Nevada, from the Spanish for “snow-capped,” was named for its hundreds of ranges.

These were formed by the stretching of the continent until it ripped apart, tossing rock and earth into what is now a heroic network of north-south-running mountains and valleys.

As glaciers melted at the close of the Ice Age, the trapped store of ground water in the often porous jumble of rock underlying the area became the Great Basin “carbonate aquifer.”

In stark contrast to the way a massive tide of snowmelt from the Rockies courses toward the sea in the Colorado River, spring thaw in the dry ranges of the Great Basin is glugged up by plants, animals and people.

What life exists naturally aboveground, both in the hot desert to the south and in the cold desert to the north, depends on the state of the underground water table.

In “dry valleys,” the upward pressure of the carbonate aquifer sustains the springs feeding startling oases, even in the blazing deserts of Lincoln County.

In “wet valleys,” the aquifer’s pressure can make the desert seem suddenly lush. Snowmelt from the ranges drains into such highly saturated basins that it dances out of springs, then streams onto the valley floors. It can even shoot from newly drilled wells.

Just this kind of thing used to happen in Las Vegas before it pumped its local store of ground water so hard that a place whose name means “the meadows” became scrub.

Nothing terrifies the cold desert counties north of Las Vegas more than the prospect of seeing their valleys similarly denuded.

Over in the Sierra, the Los Angeles Aqueduct drained what was once Owens Lake so dry that by the 1970s, its parched alkaline playa was the source of routine dust storms behind the worst recorded particulate air pollution in U.S. history.

Owens Valley had once been a lake. By contrast, the basins at the heart of the Las Vegas pumping plan had mainly seasonal springs and streams.

In dry years, dust storms were common.

The minute that Mulroy’s applications for the Great Basin became public in October 1989, the protests were so thick that in no time “Scarlett” was being likened to another mythic figure, the man who inspired “Chinatown.”

Between 1989 and 1994, every major newspaper in the country had likened Mulroy’s project to that of the notorious William Mulholland, the Los Angeles water manager whose aqueduct had reduced the once lush Owens Valley to a dust bowl.

Some of the worst pain registered in Las Vegas itself, where biologists feared the loss of an international treasure. “The only other desert in the world with anything comparable to Nevada’s storied flora existed in Persia,” says College of Southern Nevada botanist David Charlet, “until the cradle of civilization sucked it dry.”

Among the more than 3,600 protests to Mulroy’s plan sent to the state engineer were ones from almost every agency in the Department of Interior except Reclamation.

To get her water, Mulroy would have to go through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management.

To top it off, no group took more passionate exception to Mulroy’s plan than the descendants of the very pioneers of the region. To rile a Utah Mormon, try describing the Great Basin aquifer as a Nevada “in-state resource.”

By February 1994, a chastened Mulroy had backed off the plan, so far that in an interview with the High Country News, she cheerfully quoted — and even appeared to concur with — critics that the Las Vegas pipeline was “the singularly most stupid idea anyone’s ever had.”

Then the dawn of the century brought drought.”