Alligator in Vegas, two in LA
(07-07-09) LAS VEGAS, Nevada. AP Reports:
Animal control officials say a man angling for catfish at a Sunset Park lake instead reeled in a 3 1/2-foot-long alligator.
For the full story, click on the alligators.
Over in Los Angeles, Saturday July 12 is Reptile and Amphibian Appreciation Day at the Natural History Museum. Crafts and activities for families, along with experts from the California Herpetological Association and the California Turtle and Tortoise Society. Animal guests include a duo of American alligators, a 13-foot Python, California rattlesnakes, Indian cobras and poison arrow frogs. Click here for details.
July 8: This post has been updated to add the Natural History Museum event.
Vegas Draws Line on Mead Lakeside as Trigger Point to Build Pipeline to Great Basin Ground Water
JUST in case any of the board members of the Southern Nevada Water Authority have become squeamish lately about mining the Great Basin Aquifer to sustain growth in Las Vegas, they have been given a deadline to approve building the 300-mile-long pipeline that they will need to pump the Great Basin’s ground water water south. The deadline will come when the elevation of Lake Mead, the Colorado River reservoir that currently supplies roughly 90% of Las Vegas’s water, drops another 23 feet or reaches 1,075 feet.
From today’s story by Henry Brean in the Las Vegas Review Journal:
- Board members have already approved the pipeline concept and signed off on ongoing efforts to secure water rights and environmental permits, but they have never actually voted to build the project
- That decision will come if, or perhaps when, the surface of Lake Mead sinks to elevation 1,075, a low-water mark
Nevada Supreme Court to Judge State Engineer
ASK any of the rural Nevadans who stand to lose their water to Las Vegas and its proposed 300-mile pipeline into central Nevada if the proceedings were fair, and they will laugh at your naivete. For them, Las Vegas gamed the table before the rural communities even knew that a game was on. One of their last recourses to stop the pipeline is a suit coming before the Nevada Supreme Court on Monday at 10.30am.
The court’s summary of Great Basin Water Network versus the State Engineer of Nevada reads: “In 1989, the predecessor to the Southern Nevada Water Authority filed applications for unappropriated water rights from rural Nevada for use in Las Vegas. More than 800 interested persons filed protests. In 2005, the State Engineer notified roughly 300 of the interested persons that a prehearing conference would be held to discuss the water rights applications. Some organizations and individuals …
Is Obama’s Gain the Great Basin’s Loss?
NOT EVERY American politician happens to be fluent in Mandarin. But Utah Governor Jon Huntsman is; he served his LDS mission in Taiwan. He is also no stranger to international industry. His father founded the Huntsman Corporation, which became a global chemical company whose products most of us know in the form of the Big Mac clamshell container. So President Obama’s choice of the Republican governor of Utah for ambassador to China is no surprise.
But regionally in rural Utah, Nevada and California, Gov Huntsman has an arguably rarer fluency — with western water. Utah’s West Desert counties running parallel to the Eastern Nevada valleys targeted by the Las Vegas pipeline plan have no more influential ally than the Mormon Governor. Those counties staunchly oppose the Las Vegas pipeline. In a tour of the West Desert last year, Gov. Huntsman told ranchers assembled in Delta, Millard County, “I want you …
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