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Leaking Las Vegas: Forced Rationing Looms As Lake Mead Faces Federal "Water Emergency"
Submitted by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,
Leak Mead – on your left, when you drive from Las Vegas across the Hoover Dam – is the largest reservoir in the country when at capacity. It’s fed by the Colorado River which provides water for agriculture, industry, and 40 million people in Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. Now after 15 years of drought, the “lake” – a mud puddle surrounded by a huge chalky bathtub ring – is threatening to run dry.
It’s considered “operationally full” when the water level is at 1,229 feet elevation above sea level. On May 2, the water level was down to 1,078.9 feet above sea level, the lowest since it was being filled in May 1937. It’s down 15 feet from the same day a year ago. Over the last 36 months, the water level has dropped 44.8 feet. It’s down 150 feet from capacity.
If the water level is below 1,075 feet elevation – 4 feet below today’s level – by January 1, 2016, it will trigger a federal water emergency. And water rationing. Las Vegas Review Journal reported that forecasters expect the level to drop to 1073 feet by June, before Lake Powell would begin to release more water. Assuming “average or better snow accumulations in the mountains that feed the Colorado River – something that’s happened only three times in the past 15 years,” the water level on January 1 is expected to be barely above the federal shortage level.
Even with these somewhat rosy assumptions of “average or better than average snow accumulations,” the water level would begin set new lows next April. But if the next winter is anything like the last few, all bets are off.
If the level drops below 1050 feet, one of the two intake pipes for the Las Vegas Valley, which gets 90% of its water that way, will run dry. A new $817-million tunnel is being built by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to create a new drain to get the last drop out of the bathtub. It should be ready by September.
The LA Times explains what water rationing would mean for the states:
Las Vegas has long been at a disadvantage when it comes to Lake Mead water. A 1922 Colorado River water-sharing agreement among seven Western states — one still in effect nearly a century later — gives southern Nevada the smallest amount of all; 300,000 acre-feet a year, compared with California’s 4.4 million annual acre-feet. An acre-foot can supply two average homes for one year.
This summer, officials will make their projection for Lake Mead water in January 2016. If the estimate is below 1,075 feet, rationing kicks in: Southern Nevada would lose 13,000 acre-feet per year and Arizona would lose 320,000 acre-feet. California’s portion would not be affected.
Note the last sentence – that California would not be affected. Keeping lawns green in LA is top priority.
“Between Lake Mead and Lake Powell, you have over 50 million acre feet in storage when they’re full,” explained Pat Mulroy, former general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority from 1991 until she retired in 2014. “To have them both go down to a quarter of their capacity is a pretty scary proposition,” she said.
Here she is, via Brookings, on the water crisis at Lake Mead, with ghostly images of the lake and of Hover Dam sitting high and dry:
To get through the drought, residents and growers in California’s Central Valley have been pumping water from aquifers to take a shower, fill a glass with water, irrigate almond orchards, or do a million other things. But now, it turns out, even those aquifers, whose water levels are already dropping, are threatened by something else.
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moved out of Phoenix about a decade ago. I now live in a water-rich area with fertile soils. Despite the abundance of water, I built my farm around permaculture techniques that captures water (swales, ponds, cisterns, cover crops to slow water down, and wood-chips/mulches) for later use. I let gravity water my fruit trees for me.
Not sure that permaculture will ever feed a significant portion of the world's population, but it does work for a significant portion of my family's caloric needs.
I would be frightened if I still lived in Phoenix.
I just built my first Hugel in the form of a stawberry bed.
;)
I use strawberries as ground cover in my wood-chip orchard. They take over...and out compete most weeds. After they're done producing, I put out oats and let that grow up (strawberry's love the shade) and then chop and drop them in the fall. then I toss on another 3 inches of wood-chips and the healthiest berries grow back the next year.
I don't water my wood-chip orchard anymore....this system works great.
enjoy your berries and I hope you get enough for home-made jam!
Subversive!
"Las Vegas may have to ration water? How's Rio and Macao looking?"
another CRISIS!!!.......boring.
long PICO
Well, what can Kirk tell ya, besides the necessary but painful truth:
Humans are still WIP: Clever monkeys, whose "organized worldviews" aka (1) old-time Religion and (2) old-time Politics are doing their best to keep it that way (and maintain the lifestyle of their elite)
Note that Complex Systems do NOT change proactively or voluntarily. Rather, they change because Mother Nature (a) takes them to the Toolshed and... or (b) just "takes them out" altogether.
/ Now, go back to your failed worldviews (politics and religion) that got you into this mess in the first place. Cause... You just can't help it, little minkeys" /sarc
Kirk out.
Just go freakin tap a glacier.
Then go harvest an iceberg.
fixed.
With no major weather systems, this whole region will return to the long-term normal, a barren, wasteland. Quite a run for a bunch of mobsters who laughed all the way to the grave.
Wonder what the relocation costs are going to be and which states will get the privledge of "hosting" the refugee camps?
well there where the Okies, so what are we going to call them, the Navedies?
This is why you don't let the government regulate natural resources. It sets the price too low, keeps it too low for decades, and when a shortage inevitably develops, the government blames the weather, overconsumption by private individuals, or greedy business practices. The government will never acknowledge that its manipulation of the price mechanism duped people into thinking that there was more water than actually existed.
Though some are not so easily duped, everyone individually has a microscopically small incentive to check their consumption because nobody technically owns the water. That, and not everyone has the time to do extensive, often fruitless, research on what the price of water should be or how much each person should consume because, without a free market in water, it's impossible to know all subjective preferences, all variables. This isn't to say that government control makes knowledge impossible, but economic knowledge becomes obscured behind a fog of bureaucratic opinion and just as inconsistent as that.
Even if you could possess all of that information by whatever means (such as through supercomputers), with a government system, competing, diametrically opposing interests who all think the government has an obligation to help them or do what they say will ensure the inconsistency of laws, enforcement, and resource allocation. In a democracy, because governments of all levels do in fact have that obligation, one interest will necessarily benefit at the expense of everyone else on a relative level. Of course, everyone suffers on an absolute basis, but the point is this: governments cannot solve one problem without creating another of equal or greater weight, does not have more information than the market, cannot prevent the tragedy of the commons that it causes by its regulation in place of market regulation, and cannot make rational economic calculation possible, as Ludwig von Mises so staunchly argued.
Of course there's a drought--you live in a desert, the climate of which is defined by low precipitation! Therefore, as the law of supply would dictate, the price should be much higher, or additional water must be found or produced. There are market solutions to all government caused problems, such as desalination and establishing private property rights in water such as through seasteading.
This is not climate change. This is just what happens when one tries to combine two contradictions into one hopelessly confused anti-concept--the use of force (The State) with the use of reason (voluntarism, laissez faire capitalism).
There is a high confidence level (4/5) that it is exacerbated by global warming according to the IPCC. It's shown on the map of AR5 WG2 Summary For Policymakers. This was also discussed about two weeks ago by the lead author of WG2, Chris Field (a Cali resident), at Harvard's President's invitation moderated by Charlie Rose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pDb0mPyedk&feature=player_detailpage#t=...
Chris Field discusses climate change, government, and markets vis-a-vis California's drought...
all who think the government has an obligation to help them
should simply realize that government only helps
those Megainterests that buy and pay for their legislators.
It was 1088 in 1964 ... we survived.
http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/hourly/mead-elv.html
duh, it's lower than that now and the population change from 50 years ago is what?
I'll bet that the casino owners will pay handsomely for water deliveries (by rail ?). The homeowners in Vegas are totally F$^&ed but the gambling will go on even after a nuclear blast...
PS - It takes 10 standard rail tankers to move 1 acre/foot of water...
I smell Buffett.
Alternate crude tankers with water tankers so that when it derails the fireball will put itself out.
More immigrants will do the trick.
Could work if each immigrant is required to bring barrel of water for admittance to USSA theme park.
So that will be good for the wedding industry then? Straight up from the rural hinterlands in India. http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/the-water-wives
It was a nice lake for recreation. Now it sad to see in person. Quite remarkable is the bathtub ring.
Arizona, California and Nevada need to get together and buy a shit load of scrubbing bubbles and dump them in the lake. That will clean up that nasty ring.
I thought climate change was raising the level of oceans? Who can we beleive. They could pipe water from tehewest coast but then if that water was any good calif would be using it, right? Beside for th e next few decades that water will be glowing
1. Seattle/PNW is no longer the rainy city/mecca of liquid sunshine. weve had near zero snow the past couple winters, and it just doesnt rain here 23/6 like it used to-climate change?
2. The Cascade/Siskyous Snowpack is near zero and its only May
I imagine that the mighty Columbia is low too.
Let's keep in mind that Las Vegas dumps their sewage into Lake Mead UPSTREAM from where they have their inlet for their drinking water. This was done a long time before Las Vegas had its huge population explosion.
Recycling. Yummy! :-)
ALERT*ALERT* Water shortage in the desert!
Colorado has the smoke, just add ladies of the night and gambling legally and BOOM.
I'm surprised nobody has referenced the movie "Rango".
In that movie, the lizard who took the name Rango finds a town called Dirt, where the mayor is involved with a business stealing water to divert it to golf courses and hotels (e.g., Vegas).
The movie has some great economic lessons in it, if you realize that water is money, in that town. Which they help with; the bank contains water in a safe.
There's also a Hunter S. Thompson brief cameo towards the beginning.
Think about this...
Every drop of water that has ever been on the earth is still here!
Just not in Nevada
You know Las Vegas is really going downhill when even water no longer wants to visit.
This is why you don't live in a region that doesn't naturally produce water. No matter how many boobies they show you.
Sure you bet & all scripted by using the Weather Manipulaltion planned on the USA for a Malthusian Crisis. This is why Congress will not address GeoEngineering or HAARP issues etc.
Smupid & smupidity.
Ain't it great !
Can't fed just print it?
Store Fracked Oil in Lake Mead.
Suppose they found a way to blow the Hoover dam for fun and false flag events.. what would happen
Since the Hoover Dam supplies about 1/3 the countries electric , It could possibly shut down nearly 1/2 the whole system.
It would probably take a nuclear bomb to tear out the whole dam .
The resulting flood would be secondary to the nuc. If non nuc the flooding could be massive and probably do much flooding and damage to L.A.
Where does the Colorado river drain? Robert F.. best answers.
Eh, your numbers are a bit off there sparky. Hoover dam's generating capacity is a bit over 2,000 megawatts. Total generating capacity of the US grid is north of 1,000 gigawatts. Hoover dam has barely enough capacity to light up the casinos on the Strip. But, you can bet that the casinos have a contingency plan to bring in their own generators if things get dicy.
Pat Mulroy. From Polansky's "Chinatown"? Is this the little girl who was the product of the incest between Faye Dunaway and John Huston's characters?
Freaky.
Sounds like Vegas needs some FREEDOM!
We bloomed some deserts.
weird how no one has mentioned the new water treaty with mexico. lots more water going to mexico right when some major new farms are setup.....
Soooo, it's not an emergency until the Feral Govt declares it...... LOL. Shit, everythings an emergency to them, that's the excuse to rob you kind sirs!
And the link takes you to Wolf Street Business whatever. The article claims 3 billion gallons of water wasted fracking.... Probably so,,, but,,, 3 billion gallons equal a little over 9000 acre feet. Not too much when considering the 4.4 million acre feet going to California. Especially when probably 1/2 that is used to keep the lawns green and the pools full in the desert.
And in the meantime, the Army Corp of Engineers is dumping 27 billion gallons a day of fresh water out of Lake Okechobee into the Atlanic Ocean. What a total waste of water.
In the future Lake mead will be a desert.
you can bet Putin has that new outflow pipe crosshaired on the big board.
Same crap that happened in Florida in the 90's everything was all dried up. THEN the rain came and and in one spring the lakes that had been dry for 10's of years filled up. Scaremongering that's it. And I bet if you look hard enough somebody is trying to make money off of it.
Everyone should shit and piss in buckets and save it up all summer.
I expect that the low water numbers will be pushed ad naseum by the media while at their seasonal lows. Of course due to fracking being exempt from the clean water act, the government encouraged the destruction of aquifers in California. Maybe in a few years will shall see all of the smaller shale companies sued into the ground and another consolidation of ownership. Maybe we will have as many oil companies as we do cell phone carriers in a few years time. Then of course the new water barrons...
Keep taxing rainwater assholes.
Government, good lookin' out.
not.
Did the math a while back and figured out the outflow of the Mississippi River could fill up Lake Meade in about a day; the Amazon could do it in about 45 minutes. The problem is that the Colorado is a somewhat dinky river and always has been. The Dutch or the Germans would have built several pipelines to the Pacific Northwest by now. Californians prefer to wring their hands.
and Leadville (mines) have 2 trillion gallons of leaded water just ready to ... (waiting for the earthquake)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppGd-2nEOVQ
Never been there, and since i've heard the cheap food deals have gone away, i'm not going to, either.
As far as the shortage, take a case of bottled water. Shit on the side of the road. Problem solved, it works in Mexico.
They need to install numerous desalination plants along the ocean.
NUCLEAR with the Fuki leaks.
deleted
Nevada, Arizona, Utah all have severe drought problem but still invisible in MSM. Whole hysteria is about California what is still much better off then other states.
Honest and Intelligent take on issue of drought vs. water crisis in California, devoid of hidden agenda I found at:
https://sostratusworks.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/california-waterworld-of...
The government put the 100,000 sq ft NSA facility in arid Utah. They tried to keep their water usage a secret. According to Salt Lake Tribune the facility uses about 6 million gallons a month.
It is imperative the NSA keep metadata in perpetuity because otherwise people might drink the water that cools the computers. It is more important for them to know how many times you call or email. They have their priorities and slaking your thirst isn't one of them.
Imagine how much this water usage will increrase over time as they put more and more computers online to store all this crappy info. The government threatens us all the time with temperature increasing and that will further increase water usage at the facility.
We definitely should let government run our lives. They think things out so thoroughly.
couldn't they recycle the water though. why use a new 6 million each month?
Probably they could recycle but it would have to be cooled. When water is heated some will be lost so reusing will result in mineral increase- becoming hard water. Hard water is tough on fixtures, clothes, your hair and skin. I am not sure if this would affect the cooling properties. The point is the megadata in perpetuity is a waste of resources- water and electricity.
holy sheepshit Cheech!
I read that Las Vegas is the city with the highest use of fresh water per citizen on the planet. Has nobody told those morons they are living in the desert? Now there is something interesting to behold in regard to these examples with Las Vegas and California droughts. Have you not noticed how liberal scum there think they can defy the Mother Nature? That characteristic of theirs are not showing just on this example, but in their demeanor and behavior generally. Generally they aspire to defy the Mother Nature, whether it is about building things that have no place in the deserts, or their propensity to immoral behavior, sexual perversions, etc. As a rule, those liberals always pursue a course which is never in accordance with the nature. So they ought to be properly rewarded for their behavior! Sodomans and Gomoras have been, and it's only right that Californians and Las Vegans do too.