Requiem for a River

(Page 4 of 5)

"We recycle everything that hits the sewer system." she says. "It either gets reused on a golf course or in the Strip's fountains, or we treat it and return it to the Colorado River. And for every gallon we put back in, we can take a gallon over our allocation out."

Mulroy describes the city's considerable conservation efforts. Even with those measures, outdoor watering accounts for 70 percent of the city's water use-a typical figure for most of the urban Southwest. So the Southern Nevada Water Authority offers a two-dollar bounty for every square foot of turf that homeowners rip up, which comes to nearly $3,000 for a typical yard. All homes built since 2003 must have water-conserving landscaping in the front yard, and lawns can cover no more than half the backyard. There's a moratorium on golf course construction. There are plans to construct an intake pipe 24 feet in diameter at the bottom of Lake Mead, a $400 million insurance policy in case the lake's level falls below the city's existing pipes.

When I ask Mulroy whether cities in the Southwest will ultimately have to enact some sort of growth limitations in the face of a drought exacerbated by global warming, she leans toward me across the vast plain of her desk; I reflexively lean away.

"Water has never constrained growth in the Southwest. What is critically important is not the rate of growth but how we grow. I came here in 1974, and for me to sit here today..." She gestures to the high-rise skyline outside her office window. "We're getting more compact, more of an urban-core community. To the extent that we live on less land and we get away from the quarter-acre with grass all around it, we've met a lot of the water resource objectives that we need to.

"Everyone who asks me that question, I ask them a question: Where do you want these people to live? People are going to go where the jobs are, and every community is going to create as many jobs for their children as they can. If they're not in Las Vegas, they'll be in Colorado. So tell me where you want them."

Perhaps in a part of the country that isn't a desert, I want to say, but prudence or gutlessness keeps me silent.

Las Vegas gets 90 percent of its water from the Colorado River, and by 2015 or so it will face shortages without another supply. That is why Mulroy is pushing a plan to build a $2 billion pipeline to pump more than 180,000 acre-feet of water to the city each year from the rural valleys of northern Nevada.

In April 2007 Nevada's state engineer partially approved the first stage of that plan, giving Las Vegas access to groundwater in Spring Valley, which lies just west of Snake Valley in the Great Basin. Mulroy was hoping to get 91,000 acre-feet a year, but the state engineer, citing concerns about the health of Spring Valley's aquifers, limited the initial amount to 40,000 acre-feet. However, the decision will be followed by others as the Southern Nevada Water Authority goes after water in the Great Basin's other valleys. "At full development I think we'll have 50 percent of our water coming from the Colorado and 40 percent from groundwater supplies," Mulroy says.

In any case, she says, the city doesn't have any other options.

She leans back in her chair. "At the end of the day this organization has to face almost two million people and explain why no water is coming out of their tap." She leans forward. "We have to do this." She's speaking very loudly now. "We don't have a choice."

Callao, Utah
[Elevation 4,348 feet]

"I wish she would stop and think about it," Cecil Garland tells me as we drive around the remote community of Callao, Utah, in his Dodge Ram V8 -- "she" being Pat Mulroy. "They're talking about an 84-inch pipeline up here to take water out. You could just about drive this pickup through that. It can't happen."

Garland is a fit and active 82-year-old rancher and former Vegas craps dealer. Callao, home to five ranching families, lies in the heart of the Great Basin at the north end of Snake Valley, about 70 miles from Nevada's Highway 50, once singled out by Life magazine as "the loneliest road in America." I met Garland at his adobe-walled home, which is shaded by two huge, 100-year-old cottonwoods. He greeted me barefoot -- "My wife made me take off my muddy shoes" -- wearing a denim work shirt and overalls. He's sturdily built, about six feet tall, bald, with a gray mustache.

"They look on the map and they don't see any roads or any big towns," he told me as we sat on his porch. "They just automatically assume that there's a vacuum here, a huge vacancy. And it isn't so. What you find here is people living tranquilly. Our biggest concern is, did we have a good calf crop, can we get our hay up without it getting wet-bright, clean hay. The reason you don't see any cities and towns here is there's damn little water. That should be elementary. If there was a vast amount of water here, we'd be farming and using it, because we've got all the land in the world."

To make his point, Garland spends a couple of hours driving me around the irrigated fields of Callao. From the air, this is one of those mysterious places where you see perfect circles of green surrounded by bare, brown desert. We've stopped by one of those circles now, and are looking at the big pivot irrigation system that created it. The system consists of a quarter-mile-long pipe fitted with sprinklers and wheels. Driven by electric motors, the pipe pivots around a hub, typically making a complete circuit every seven days.

Garland says that the 40,000 acre-feet of Spring Valley water awarded to Las Vegas would be equivalent to 150 pivot systems, 75 miles long if laid end to end, running day and night for six months. "Those of us who have practical experience, we know you can't do that."

He drives me to a field where he's preparing to plant alfalfa. First he had to clear the field of greasewood, a spiny-branched shrub with bright green leaves that stand out against the desert's gray-green sage.

"It takes five to six years to make the transition from greasewood to alfalfa," he says. "There's a brief period in there when you can't irrigate during the winter, and you've already ripped up the greasewood, so you've exposed the soil." He kneels and scoops a handful of powdery sand-a single winter's wind has removed all the topsoil. Garland fears that the entire valley could look like this if Las Vegas has its way.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority insists that if its pumping shows any sign of damaging any of the valleys' aquifers, the operation will stop. But no one in Snake Valley believes that. Once the water starts to flow, people here are convinced it will be impossible to turn off, even for someone with Pat Mulroy's political clout. "Giving Las Vegas water is like giving a drunk a drink," Garland tells me.

As we drive back to his home, I mention Mulroy's assertion that agriculture uses 90 percent of Nevada's water and that 75 percent of the state's population-concentrated in urban areas-uses just 10 percent while generating more than 60 percent of the state's economic activity. Farms contribute just over $300 million to Nevada's $100 billion economy. After my recitation of facts, Garland continues to look straight ahead as he drives, speaking with resignation and sadness.

"You know, to say that, to even think that, speaks of a callousness that I despair of. Even if they took all the humans out of this valley and said, we'll take the water-that would be the least of it," he says. "The true destruction would be to destroy the marshes and seeps and springs. And for what? For more sprawl? I cherish my ranch because it offers me a way of life. It's hard work a lot of the time. Many times I've been on my side trying to straighten out a calf inside a cow that couldn't be born the way it was, and I wonder why I quit dealing craps in Vegas and came up here. But I don't wonder very damn long."

Leaving Callao, I recall my conversation with rancher Dean Baker in Snake Valley. "We drilled and beat our heads against a wall with four or five wells," Baker told me. "What we learned, and you can imagine how much it cost us to learn, is that it's a closed dish of water. If you pump one of those and start sucking water, a half mile away the level of water keeps going down." The Southern Nevada Water Authority, he said, will probably learn the same hard lessons.

I asked Mulroy about some of the concerns voiced by Baker and Garland.

"First, there is no question that the initial 40,000 acre-feet permitted to the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Spring Valley is available annually," she wrote to me in an e-mail. "The Nevada state engineer, who is historically very conservative in granting water rights, verified that more than that amount is available for use on an annual basis."

She added that pumping from one well would not necessarily affect springs at another location. "It is also important to understand that there are subterranean barriers such as geologic faults that affect where and to what extent effects propagate. If we sank a well adjacent to a spring, as Mr. Baker and others have done, it would very likely affect its flow. However, our hydrologists will construct exploratory wells so that we can evaluate how the aquifer will respond to a given pumping rate and frequency. We will use that information to site the wells and manage withdrawals for minimal effect."

Jim Deacon, a biologist recently retired from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas who has studied Great Basin ecosystems for more than 40 years, says the best available evidence contradicts Mulroy's claims. A paper that he co-authored last fall in the journal BioScience found that pumping on the scale planned by the Southern Nevada Water Authority could lower groundwater levels in 50,000 square miles of the Great Basin. Depending on local geology, water tables could plunge by anywhere from 50 to 1,600 feet over the next several decades. Moreover, a study issued last fall by the U.S. Geological Survey showed that the aquifers in Spring Valley and Snake Valley are connected.

Continued...