Sin City Goes Dry

Last December I revisited Las Vegas, and for the first time my overriding mission was not to get away from it. I found Sin City strange and fascinating and utterly disgusting. But the sins that caught my attention were not the ones you might imagine. They had nothing to do with the hookers who flounce around the casinos with paunchy husbands vacationing from their wives, or the hydroelectric profligacy of claptrap signs and garish, cheesy buildings, or even the ceaseless thievery from 30 million to 40 million willing victims a year. There’s a different kind of thievery going on here, and the victims aren’t willing. Most aren’t even human.

Thievery is a Las Vegas tradition. The city was built largely by thieves, including such organized-crime figures as Davey Berman, Gus Greenbaum,  Morris Rosen, Benny Binion, and Bugsy Siegel. It squats in the Mojave Desert, one of the driest regions on earth in the driest state in the union. Yet Las Vegas has always grabbed and swilled water from its own and distant basins, thereby devastating desert ecosystems. Few U.S. cities have higher per capita water consumption.

In 1829, when Rafael Rivera, a scout from a Mexican trading party, stumbled onto the site of the future city, artesian wells sprang from the earth with a velocity that could suspend a grown man well above the ground. The oasis bloomed with wildflowers and native grasses. It came to be called Las Vegas, Spanish for “the meadows.”

Unsustainable groundwater pumping started drying up these and other springs in the early 20th century. With the death of a major valley spring and creek in 1957, the world lost the Las Vegas dace, a fish that had survived and adapted to the desert from the age of sprawling glacial lakes. The city’s growth—among the fastest in the nation—has been made possible by Lake Mead, a Colorado River impoundment created by the Hoover Dam. Under an agreement with Mexico and the other Colorado River basin states, the Las Vegas Valley—through its water manager, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA)—gets to pump 300,000 acre-feet per year from Lake Mead. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, enough to supply one family for a year.

That allocation, however, cannot sustain growth of the conjoined gaming and construction industries, which city fathers contend is essential for Nevada’s economy. Their shibboleth, oft uttered verbatim, is “Grow or die.” They envision no limits. The SNWA, which has been madly purchasing water rights, proposes to annually take 180,000 acre-feet of groundwater, mostly from rural east-central Nevada but also from Utah and California—and convey it to Las Vegas via an 84-inch-diameter pipe from as far out as 250 miles.

Within the 78-basin area likely to be affected are 20 federally threatened or endangered, wetland-dependent species and 137 wetland- or spring-dependent species with extremely limited distributions and that would have been listed had not the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service essentially quit that process. The project is being fast-tracked by Congress and the Bush administration; if it is approved by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), by local governments, and by the state engineer, work could start in 2009. Under orders from Washington, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the BLM have withdrawn their protests.

The SNWA figures out how much water it can economically suck out of the ground and calls it “perennial yield.” And the perennial yield that hasn’t been allocated it calls “unused water.” Unused water, it claims, is currently being “lost to evapotranspiration.” In other words, it’s being wasted on plants.

James Deacon, the eminent desert biologist from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, for whom the extinct Las Vegas dace (Rhinichthys deaconi) was named, says it’s pretty clear that if you take perennial yield, “all spring discharge and evapotranspiration will cease, there will be no underflow to other basins, and all plants that rely on groundwater will die.” He agrees with the SNWA that there are some basins where perennial yield has not been fully allocated. But he points out that there are also basins where 250, 350, and even 600 percent have been allocated. “The aquifers interconnect,” says Deacon, “and even without additional pumping the combined current allocation for the entire 78-basin area is 102 percent.”

In September 2006 the SNWA sought (and at this writing awaits) approval by the state engineer of water-right applications for Spring Valley, an Audubon-designated Important Bird Area (IBA) that shares groundwater with Great Basin National Park. At the public hearing the SNWA claimed it had not gotten around to running its computer model to project effects on the water table, but when a National Park Service hydrologist ran the model it showed a 150-foot drop in the water table over 75 years. “SNWA announced that if it didn’t get this water, growth would stop in Las Vegas,” reports John Hiatt, chair of the BLM’s Mojave-Southern Great Basin Resource Advisory Council and conservation chair of the local Red Rock Audubon Society. “It had about 50 witnesses lined up, and 40 were just political and development types saying they really, really wanted this water. This was a technical hearing, where you need to justify need for water on technical grounds. It is unprecedented, in my experience.”

I stayed at the 3,933-room Bellagio Hotel and Casino, built on the Las Vegas Strip in 1998 for $1.6 billion. The Strip contains eight of the world’s 10 biggest hotels, and new ones are sprouting on all compass points. Currently there are 135,000 hotel rooms, and there’ll be 41,000 more by 2010. Las Vegas Valley has a population of 1.8 million, and at the current growth rate that figure will double by 2030. Each month a square mile of virgin Mojave Desert habitat gets covered with houses.