Sin City Goes Dry

There wasn’t a word about water conservation in my room. The high-volume, high-pressure shower nearly drove me to my knees, and I could have hosted a cocktail party in the separate bathtub. Outside the Bellagio, at its 900-foot-long cement pond, I joined hundreds of tourists to watch the eruption of 1,203 individually controlled jets that blast water to heights of 244 feet. The show, which happens every 30 minutes, is computer-choreographed to lights and operatic arias. Close by are the Venetian Hotel and Casino, where you can take gondola rides through water-filled canals; the Mirage Hotel and Casino, where massive water eruptions issue from a fake volcano; the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino, where, on a freshwater sea, a Spanish galleon fights it out nightly with a British man-o-war; and the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, where you can surf on six-foot-high waves in a 1.6-million-gallon “wave pool.”

Most of the water from these lavish displays is recirculated, but a great deal evaporates. As for indoor water, the SNWA and the gaming lobby argue that there’s no need to conserve it because, after tertiary sewage treatment, most gets dumped into Lake Mead, and the city gets a gallon-for-gallon credit on its allocation.

Still, with all this indoor and outdoor extravagance it’s hard to convince the public that it needs to commit to serious water conservation. And the torrent of effluent is polluting Lake Mead with sediment. To slow the flow and partially stabilize the eroding banks of the steep, seven-mile channel, the SNWA is installing riprap, gabions, and at least 20 cement weirs; but the flood intensifies. What’s more, the effluent is laced with hormone disrupters from excreted pharmaceutical products such as birth-control pills. An eight-year study by the U.S. Geological Survey found sharply reduced sperm counts and mixed sexual characteristics in Lake Mead fish, including endangered razorback suckers. But the study is being suppressed by the Bush administration. “They’ve been sitting on this for two years,” team leader Timothy Gross told The Las Vegas Sun. “They don’t like the conclusions. We’ve been told specifically the issues are too sensitive, that it would inhibit economic development in the area.”

Complicating the pollution problem in Lake Mead is the fact that the water-intake pipe is six miles downcurrent from the effluent outflow. The city’s suggested solution: a $750 million pipe to shunt the effluent into the middle of the lake.

“The response I used to get was: ‘There’s no need to conserve because we have this allotment of water from the Colorado River, and if we don’t use it up, other states will,’ ” says environmental activist and 35-year valley resident Jeff van Ee. When Las Vegas approached the limit of its allocation about six years ago, the SNWA began a conservation-education effort. Now it promotes “water smart landscaping” and pays property owners to replace grass with desert-adapted vegetation.

But much more could be done. For example, cities like Tucson—which each day uses 114 gallons of water per person compared with Las Vegas’s 174—charge a modest fee for the first 5,000 gallons a month, then sharply increase rates for additional usage.

Despite the SNWA’s commendable if belated efforts, costly illusions remain in vogue, as van Ee and I observed in the city’s outskirts. A case in point is the sprawling development to the west known as The Lakes, where Colorado River water evaporates into dry desert air from artificial, clay-lined impoundments with names like Lake Sahara. A few front yards are planted with native vegetation, but most grow Yankee-style turf, irrigated by automatic sprinklers that frequently operate in the rain. Streets here have wide borders of irrigated grass. From Lake North Road we turned onto Crane Lake Road, then Sandy Shores Road, then Cherry Springs Lane, past the Beachmont, Whalers Cove, Haven Beach, and Sunset Point. We exited onto Lake West Road. It never dawned on the developers or residents that the American desert has its own subtle, unique beauty.

Bob Fulkerson, director of a pro-water-conservation outfit called the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, and his community organizer, A.J. McClure, guided me to The Lakes at Las Vegas, on Sin City’s southern flank—a bigger and even more ostentatious development in “a lush Mediterranean theme,” as the promo barks, and built around even bigger artificial impoundments and diversions. Of the hundreds of mansions, many owned by such luminaries as Céline Dion (who croons regularly at Caesars Palace), I didn’t see one that looked to be worth less than $1 million. There is a Ritz-Carlton and a Hyatt. Coots darken four irrigated, palm-studded golf courses, parting and coalescing like quicksilver around mowing machines whose drivers vainly attempt to herd them to the water. Swimming pools abound. Pump-powered creeks feed plastic-lined ponds. A pump-powered waterfall tumbles hundreds of feet down the face of a sandstone cliff. The surrounding hills, sliced and diced by earthmoving machines, resemble Appalachian mountaintop-removal operations. Water jets blast construction sites to keep down the dust.

“We hired an engineer to do a study,” declared Fulkerson, “and he found that 3,000 acre-feet a year evaporates from The Lakes at Las Vegas. That’s enough for 12,000 people who live in apartments—just going into the air for rich people who hate the idea of living in the Mojave Desert, who want Massachusetts in Nevada. I think that’s an abomination. To us, it’s the most stark and immoral example of water waste in Las Vegas.”

Van Ee, who retired in 2005 after 34 years as an engineer with the Environmental Protection Agency, had landed in trouble with his superiors for, on his own time, defending the endangered desert tortoise in one of its last major strongholds—a remote valley 70 miles north of Las Vegas called Coyote Springs. In 1990, after Congress had transferred 49,000 publicly owned acres to Aerojet General for a rocket test site, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sought to “mitigate” damage to critical habitat by outfitting 11 tortoises with radio tags. When van Ee publicly opined that the money would be better spent protecting other tortoise habitat, the EPA responded with a gag order. Then, after failing to get the U.S. attorney to prosecute him for felony conflict of interest on grounds that he had played Charlie McCarthy for the Sierra Club, it issued an official reprimand. With help from the Government Accountability Project, van Ee got the reprimand pulled, and, with counsel provided by the American Civil Liberties Union, successfully sued the EPA for its unlawful action, thus setting an important free-speech precedent for all federal employees.