There will be blood
FEW among us will become the face of a catastrophe, but Pat Mulroy will. In 1989 the general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District staked her career on her ability to drive a pipeline nearly 300 miles north in order to tap the Great Basin aquifer.
Only Pat, her employees and the wishful have ever denied the ultimate cost of the water needed to fill this pipe. Rather, for the last two decades, the question has been: Where will the suffering be felt?
If Pat got the rural water, disaster would befall the Nevadan basins whose groundwater she intended to tap. If she didn’t, it would strike Las Vegas, whose irrepressible growth for much of the last two decades banked on the pipeline to refresh its dwindling supply of Colorado River water.…
Las Vegas pipeline loses its water
The 2007 award by the Nevada State Engineer of 40,000 acre feet of water a year to Las Vegas from Spring Valley in White Pine County, Nevada, pictured above, will be voided as part of the Nevada Supreme Court decision finding that the due process rights of the protestors were violated.
In a stunning reversal for Las Vegas water manager Patricia Mulroy, ground-water awards that were to fill an almost 300-mile-long pipeline planned by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to run from central eastern Nevada to Las Vegas were invalidated today. In an unanimous decision, the Nevada Supreme Court decided that the State Engineer violated the due process rights of hundreds, if not thousands, of people in target valleys across the Great Basin who had long protested the pipeline and water withdrawals.
February 2, 2010 update: see appended correction.…
Whiskey’s for drinking at CBS
Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting
No sooner has Lesley Stahl snapped shut her dictionary of Twain quotes* used in the recent CBS show “60 Minutes” on the California water crisis as it’s been opened again to the same page — this time by the network’s Atlanta-based reporter Mark Strassmann for a CBS Evening News broadcast.
This time one of the figures driving the network to drinking cliches is the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager Pat Mulroy, who will appear on CBS Evening News tonight to discuss American water shortages, including those of her agency covering Las Vegas. Those who don’t buy that serving unfettered development in the Mojave Desert qualifies her as a conservationist may need to start drinking now. To see how heavily, click here.
*See the Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck at Inkstain on the veracity of the Twain attribution. This post …
Gag me with a high rise
Las Vegas City Center. Photo: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times. Click on the image to be taken to the story.
AS the US heads to Copenhagen without any clear plan to combat the effects of climate change on water, one of the areas predicted to be worst hit by global warming, Las Vegas, Nevada, is opening “CityCenter.”
In a preview so unctuous that it would embarrass an ad agency, the Los Angeles Times travel section writes, “Even in Las Vegas, a town not given to architectural subtleties, CityCenter looms large. The 67-acre, $8.5-billion, 18-million-square-foot ‘city within a city’ combines size and flourish with environmental consciousness.”
What?…
Las Vegas loses water rights to key valleys
IN A phenomenal reversal for Las Vegas in its 20-year quest for water from the Great Basin Aquifer, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has been stripped of rights to 18,755 acre feet of water a year, or enough for more than 37,000 homes, which it had been allocated from three key basins.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports today that Nevada District judge Norman C. Robison has ruled that the State Engineer “acted arbitrarily, capriciously and oppressively” when he cleared the authority to pump more than 6 billion gallons of groundwater a year from Cave, Delamar and Dry Lake valleys.
Above and beyond the amount of water involved, this is a crippling strategic blow to the authority. Located in neighboring Lincoln County, Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys are critical first sites* for the proposed well-fields that will feed what Las Vegas envisions as a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline…
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
