Vegas pipeline hearing timeline sketched

FOLLOWING a series of damning court decisions that vacated almost 80,000 acre feet a year of groundwater awards to Las Vegas from four valleys in rural Nevada, the State Engineer has published a tentative schedule to re-notice and re-hear the cases. If the brisk timeline is kept, the decisions over whether or not to tap the Great Basin Aquifer to slake Las Vegas could come as early as mid-February 2012.

Under the new schedule, notices of the applications by Las Vegas for permission to tap rural groundwater over thousands of square miles will be published in regional Nevadan newspapers in November. The period in which affected parties may lodge legal protests entitling them to participate in the hearings will close in late December.

“Virtually impossible” for monitoring safeguards to work

WILL the monitoring of the groundwater pumping proposed by Las Vegas in the Great Basin safeguard the targeted valleys? “It is virtually impossible,” writes 32-year veteran of the US Geological Survey John D. Bredehoeft in the Salt Lake Tribune. To read the op-ed piece by the country’s presiding authority on groundwater, click here.

Or for a longer version of the article supplied by Dr Bredehoeft, click here.

Item 5

Updated 11/19/2009 9.21am PST

ITEM 5 on the agenda for this Thursday’s board meeting of the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls for the directors to take an October 15, 2009 decision by a Nevada district judge Norman C. Robison to the state Supreme Court.

The Robison decision deemed a 2008 award of water to Las Vegas and the SNWA by the State Engineer of Nevada from three Lincoln County valleys ”arbitrary, oppressive and a manifest abuse of discretion.” It then vacated the award for water in the three valleys that are the key first staging grounds of a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline that Las Vegas plans to run into the heart of the state to pump rural groundwater.

Why did the judge rule the way he did? According to Robison, the water — 18,755 acre feet of it a year (or enough for 37,000 homes) — isn’t there. “The state engineer acknowledged within his ruling…

This is not a spider

Its legs are too long. It's a Model Cave Harvestman, or very rare daddy long legs, which is unique to the Great Basin National Park, where discoveries of new life-forms could stand in the way of a controversial groundwater pumping plan by Las Vegas. Photo: John Locher / Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click on the Harvestman to be taken to more photos by Locher and to read about an underground tour of Nevada's only national park by environment reporter Henry Brean in Sunday's Review-Journal. Thanks to John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal and jfleck at inkstain for catching this deliciously creepy and wondrous story out of Las Vegas.