text:
SOMERSET, Kentucky — Investigators in Pulaski County say a man has died after his lawnmower went over a cliff.
WKYT-TV (http://bit.ly/1QaMRgg ) reports that lawn service worker Jake Neikirk was mowing near the edge of a bluff in the backyard of a home near Lake Cumberland when he went over the cliff and died.
Officials say Neikirk fell at least 150 feet down the embankment.
His body will be sent to Frankfort for an autopsy.
Information from: WKYT-TV, http://www.wkyt.com


text:
Jay Leno's 'Tonight Show' Return Is a Ratings Winner
To no one's surprise, Jay Leno's much-heralded return to 'The Tonight Show' on Monday was a ratings success, at least according to early overnight numbers. According to the Hollywood Reporter, advance numbers show Leno winning his timeslot with a 5.4 rating in metered market households and a rating of 2.0 among adults 18-49. That easily beat the 3.0 household rating for 'The Late Show With David Letterman' on CBS and the ABC ratings (cited by Entertainment Weekly) of 3.4 for 'Nightline' and 1.8 for 'Jimmy Kimmel Live.'
Leno's return had coattails too. Following 'Tonight,' NBC's 'Late Night With Jimmy Fallon' posted a 2.1 rating, twice its fourth-quarter 2009 average and enough to beat usual timeslot victor 'The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson' by 40 percent.
Jay Leno Celebrates 'Tonight Show' Return With Betty White
Leno even mocked his return with an opening skit paying tribute to 'The Wizard of Oz,' in which he awoke saying, "There's no place like home." Eventually, Betty White who brought him back to reality.
Letterman Unveils the New Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Model
Also, enjoy this unveiling of the new cover on last night's 'Late Show with David Letterman.' WARNING: don't remove your pants until the very end of the video.
The Late Night Wars: Winners and Losers
Jimmy Fallon gears up for late night gig
The real challenge will be for Jimmy Fallon, Conan's Late Night successor, who hasn't had much TV time since he left Saturday Night Live for a movie career that made Chevy Chase's lineup look Lawrence Olivier-ian.
Variety reports that Fallon will first test the airwaves' waters instead of doing a full-blown cannonball by starring in some "webisodes" on NBC.com starting Monday.
Porn star wants to talk to Leno
Jay Leno has been getting some heat for refusing to have Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides on his show after having Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on many times, and now he's getting a, um, different kind of heat from another person in the race...porn star Mary Carey.
The buxom woman wants equal time on Leno's show, but Leno hasn't made any comment about it yet. Carey says that she is a very popular search term on the web, so that proves her popularity. Of course, how many of those people are in California? She says "our polling results have shown my name to be more recognizable than any other candidate in the race." I doubt her name is more known than Ahnuld's, but feel free to laugh like Beavis and Butthead when you read the words "polling results." Heh heh heh heh heh.
She ran for Governor in 2003, but this year she got her teeth replaced and got new breast implants.
Talk Talk: Who's on the late night shows tonight
- Charlie Rose: WSJ columnist Walter Mossberg, and NetFlix CEO Reed Hastings (repeat)
- The Late Show With David Letterman: Steve Martin, Michael Sessions, and the Teutuls (repeat)
- Jay Leno: George Clooney, Steve Schirripa, and Trey Anastasio (repeat)
- Jimmy Kimmel Live: Cedric the Entertainmer and Kenny Chesney (repeat)
- Late Night With Conan O'Brien: Ben MacKenzie, Jarod Miller, and David Feldman (repeat)
- The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson: Dennis Quaid, Bill Nye, and Brian Stokes (repeat)
- Last Call With Carson Daly: George Lopez, Natasha Bedingfield, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (repeat)
Talk Talk: Who's on the late night shows tonight
- Charlie Rose: director Rob Marshall and actress Diane Keaton
- The Late Show With David Letterman: Jay Thomas and Darlene Love
- Jay Leno: Sienna Miller, Gary Gulman, and the Paulist Chorists of California
- Jimmy Kimmel Live: Ryan Seacrest and Brian Wilson
- Late Night With Conan O'Brien: Bonnie Hunt, Matthew Broderick, and the John Mayer Trio
- The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson: Regis Philbin, Katey Segal, Colin Hanks, and Brian McKnight
- Last Call With Carson Daly: Johnny Knoxville, 311, and Roselyn Sanchez
TV Squad Hot Topics
Most Popular Articles
From Our Partners
- Best 'Grey's Anatomy' Quotes from 'I Choose You'
- Best 'Scandal' Quotes from ?Paris Is Burning?
- 'The Amazing Race' Leg 3 Prediction: Which Team Will Go Home Next?
- 'America's Next Top Model' Cycle 22 Prediction: Who Will Be Sent Home in Week 10?
- 'The Vampire Diaries' Episode 7.4 Photos: The Heaven and Hell Ball
- More From BuddyTV
- Kendall Jenner Poses Topless: I'm Washing Away My Sins
- Winona Ryder Feels Bad Confirming 'Beetlejuice 2': 'Seth Sort of Cornered Me'
- Katy Perry Reveals Her Taste in Men: 'I'm Not into That F**kboy Look'
- EXCLUSIVE: Frances Bean Cobain Steps Out With Wedding Band
- Hilary Swank in 'Fast & Furious'?! Tyrese Says It Almost Happened
- More From ET

subset: commoncrawl


text:
433 results for "Meteo"
Sponsored Products
Weather information in the menu bar or dock.Mac Version 1.6.1 ... Added: 11/24/12Total Downloads7,060Last Week5
weather widget for SwitzerlandMac Version 2.0 ... Added: 09/16/07Total Downloads112Last Week1
Meteo is not a classical weather app but a program which displays weather data provided by the German Weather Service limited to Europe, enabling...iOS Version 1.0 ... Added: 07/22/11Total Downloads4Last Week1
Collect weather information and radar and satellite images via e-mail or online.Windows Version 6.12 ... Added: 12/31/06Total Downloads1,181Last Week2
Weather forecast for all the world, especially for Europe and Italy (in Italian). We provide current conditions and forecast for next days with...iOS Version 2.9.3 ... Added: 10/21/11Total Downloads75Last Week1
Saluti! Basta cercare "MyFirstiPhoneApp" in iTunes (App Store) per pi Entusiasmante Apps for Free.Elegante interfaccia ... Usabilit ... Facilit di...iOS Version 1.0 ... Added: 03/28/11Total Downloads8Last Week2
Vodafone Meteo aduce pe telefon informatii furnizate de Administratia Nationala de Meteorologie despre starea actuala a vremii si prognoza pe...iOS Version 1.0 ... Added: 10/10/11Total Downloads9Last Week1
L'applicazione meteo per gli appassionati della neve!Meteo Neve fornisce tutte le informazioni indispensabili per le tue vacanze e per lo sport...iOS Version 1.0 ... Added: 02/05/11Total Downloads6Last Week1
Are you an Arduino enthusiast? Arduino is an easy to use electronic rapid prototype framework that lets programmers able to easily approach to the...iOS Version 1.0.0 ... Added: 03/23/11Total Downloads6Last Week1
OLOPHONE Meteo is a nice and useful 3D application for weather forecasts. Enjoy seeing the forecasts scrolling in a 3D fashion.Add as many cities...iOS Version 1.0 ... Added: 10/01/11Total Downloads1Last Week1
Results 1 - 10 of 433


text:
Royalty Free Music Unique To Your Project - Every Time
Royalty Free Music — Unique To Your Project – Every Time
Try SmartSound's Award Winning and Patented Technology Yourself
New Royalty Free Music Search
Or Browse By (Click to add multiple browse filters)
Genre | Instrument | Keyword | Advanced
Royalty Free Music Search Results (You are in TRACK VIEW. Switch to ALBUM VIEW)
The following tracks match: Pulsating, Bass (Acoustic)
Nothing To HideA laidback groove with emphasis on funk upright bass creates a cool and confident mood.https://www.smartsound.com/strata/images/STRATUBU_200.jpgSingle7100213-ST$ 39.957100213-EX$ 69.957100213-W$ 149.95Instrument: Bass (Acoustic), Drums, Organ, Synthesizer, Instrumental Keywords: Driving, Energetic, Cheerful, Competitive, Confident, Incessant, Inspiring, Motivating, Pulsating, Refreshing, Investigative Genre: Funky, Corporate/Technology, R&B/Soul, Urban Production Types: Commercials, Corporate, Background
Nothing To Hide from the album Upright Bass Underscores
Five Good ReasonsWith an upbeat outlook, this track paves the way for fresh ideas and future triumph.https://www.smartsound.com/strata/images/STRATPZ2_200.jpgSingle7100119-ST$ 39.957100119-EX$ 69.957100119-W$ 149.95Instrument: Bass (Acoustic), Drums, Marimba, Piano, Strings, Synthesizer, Instrumental Keywords: Driving, Energetic, Exciting, Positive, Uplifting, Inspirational, Competitive, Confident, Effervescent, Fresh, Hypnotic, Incessant, Inspiring, Motivating, Powerful, Pulsating, Refreshing, Hopeful Genre: Outdoorsy, World, Corporate/Technology, New Age Production Types: Corporate, Corporate Communications, On Hold Music, Product Videos, Background
Five Good Reasons from the album Positive Biz Vol 2
Inner City ShuffleA bouncy and fun piece of dance pop that evokes spirit and energy. Great for scenes of moving traffic or time-lapse progress.https://www.smartsound.com/strata/images/BS15OR_200.jpgSingle55104-ST$ 39.9555104-EX$ 69.9555104-W$ 149.95Instrument: Electronic, Bass (Acoustic), Guitar (Electric), Piano (Electric), Synthesizer, Instrumental, Guitar Keywords: Driving, Energetic, Lively, Perky, Pulsating, Spirited, Striving Genre: Themes, Club, Dance, Electronica, Pop Rock, House, Urban, Electronic Production Types: Sports, Commercials, Travel
Inner City Shuffle from the album Open Road
Cleaner And LeanerBright and pulsating, but with a simple backdrop, this track creates forward motion while still evoking a sense of ease.https://www.smartsound.com/strata/images/STRATGG_200.jpgSingle70502-ST$ 39.9570502-EX$ 69.9570502-W$ 149.95Instrument: Bass (Acoustic), Guitar (Acoustic), New Age Ensemble, Acoustic, Instrumental, Guitar Keywords: Cool, Light, Motivating, Pulsating, Refreshing, Relaxed, Simple, Soft Genre: Earthy, Corporate/Technology, Easy-Going Production Types: Commercials, Corporate, Corporate Communications, Background
Cleaner And Leaner from the album Going Green
Conscious ConsumptionA simple and easygoing track with muted and open acoustic guitars resulting in a nice free-wheeling feel. Rounded out with very simple percussion and base.https://www.smartsound.com/strata/images/STRATGG_200.jpgSingle70503-ST$ 39.9570503-EX$ 69.9570503-W$ 149.95Instrument: Bass (Acoustic), Guitar (Acoustic), New Age Ensemble, Instrumental, Guitar Keywords: Positive, Atmospheric, Light, Motivating, Pulsating, Refreshing, Mellow, Hopeful, Quiet, Simple, Soft Genre: Earthy, Corporate/Technology, Easy-Going Production Types: Commercials, Corporate, Corporate Communications, Background
Conscious Consumption from the album Going Green
Hybrid TimeA soft driving sound is developed by hand drums, acoustic guitar and a sweet-toned harp whose slightly digital sound creates a sense of new and familiarity at the same time.https://www.smartsound.com/strata/images/STRATGG_200.jpgSingle70507-ST$ 39.9570507-EX$ 69.9570507-W$ 149.95Instrument: Bass (Acoustic), Guitar (Acoustic), Harp, New Age Ensemble, Acoustic, Instrumental, Guitar Keywords: Positive, Light, Motivating, Pulsating, Simple, Soft Genre: Earthy, Corporate/Technology, Easy-Going Production Types: Commercials, Corporate Communications, Background
Hybrid Time from the album Going Green
The following tracks match: Bass (Acoustic)
Challenging PuzzleTrombone, honeyed strings and a rolling snare propel this hearty and confident track to a comical ending.https://www.smartsound.com/artist/images/ASFB04_200.jpgSingle7100193-ST$ 39.957100193-EX$ 69.957100193-W$ 149.95Instrument: Orchestra, Studio Orchestra, Bass (Acoustic), Brass, Chimes, Clarinet, Clarinet (Bass), Flute, Harp, Oboe, Percussion, Piano, Strings, Instrumental Genre: Orchestral Keywords: Driving, Energetic, Exciting, Happy, Tongue-in-cheek, Positive, Cool, Uplifting, Comical, Competitive, Delicate, Effervescent, Expansive, Fierce, Fresh, Funny, Gentle, Goofy, Incessant, Inspiring, Majestic, Motivating, Powerful, Striving, Tense, Thrilling, Triumphant, Wacky, Whimsical, Quirky, Fun, Hopeful, Fantasy, Investigative, Magical, Military Production Types: Kids, Animation, Video Games, Comedy
Challenging Puzzle from the album Orchestral Comedy
Entr'acteTake a bow with this delightfully silly song sprightly silver flute and weeping accordion in the midst of a spirited orchestra.https://www.smartsound.com/artist/images/ASFB04_200.jpgSingle7100194-ST$ 39.957100194-EX$ 69.957100194-W$ 149.95Instrument: Orchestra, Studio Orchestra, Accordion, Bass (Acoustic), Brass, Celeste, Chimes, Flute, Harp, Strings, Violin, Violoncello, Instrumental Genre: Orchestral Keywords: Calm, Delicate, Expansive, Gentle, Heartwarming, Innocent, Intimate, Old-Fashioned, Pensive, Refined, Reflective, Refreshing, Soothing, Sultry, Tender, Touching, Mellow, Emotional, Poignant, Quiet, Soft Production Types: Kids, Animation, Video Games, Comedy
Entr'acte from the album Orchestral Comedy
Magical FateThis infectious song booms out of the gate with a lively, percussive beat that highlighting the elements of suspense, suspense, tension and intrigue.https://www.smartsound.com/artist/images/ASFB04_200.jpgSingle7100189-ST$ 39.957100189-EX$ 69.957100189-W$ 149.95Instrument: Orchestra, Studio Orchestra, Bass (Acoustic), Bassoon, Brass, Chimes, Clarinet, Clarinet (Bass), Flute, Harp, Oboe, Percussion, Violin, Violoncello, Xylophone, Instrumental Genre: Orchestral Keywords: Mysterious, Calm, Comical, Goofy, Haunting, Hypnotic, Incessant, Powerful, Reflective, Scary, Somber, Suspenseful, Tense, Uncertain, Wacky, Whimsical, Quirky, Sneaky, Investigative, Magical, Tormented Production Types: Kids, Animation, Cinematic, Video Games, Comedy, Action-Drama
Magical Fate from the album Orchestral Comedy
Tanguito MoltoComedy abounds as silly strings pluck out a cheerful tune with the accompaniment of brass, strings and a driving synth boasting special effects.https://www.smartsound.com/artist/images/ASFB04_200.jpgSingle7100192-ST$ 39.957100192-EX$ 69.957100192-W$ 149.95Instrument: Orchestra, Studio Orchestra, Accordion, Bass (Acoustic), Bassoon, Brass, Celeste, Chimes, Clarinet, Clarinet (Bass), Flute, Harp, Percussion, Strings, Xylophone, Instrumental Genre: Orchestral Keywords: Energetic, Exciting, Mysterious, Comical, Dramatic, Funny, Incessant, Old-Fashioned, Pensive, Reflective, Sensual, Suspenseful, Uncertain, Wacky, Quirky, Drama, Sneaky, Fun, Mellow, Emotional, Investigative, Magical, Folklore, Tormented Production Types: Kids, Animation, Cinematic, Commercials, Indie Film, Film Trailer, Travel, Video Games, Comedy
Tanguito Molto from the album Orchestral Comedy
Choose your license:
|Customizable with Sonicfire Pro and Quicktracks
|Personal and professional use
|Promote a product or service
|Use on my own website
|Videos created for a third party
|Use on my clients website
|Monetized videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Etc.
|Display at Film Festivals
|Display in theaters
(one theater)
(unlimited theaters in one country)
|Assign Distribution Rights
|DVDs & Downloads
(up to 2000)
(up to 10000)
|In mobile apps
|Local TV/radio broadcasting (includes advertising)
|National TV/radio broadcasting (includes advertising)


text:
Whitewater parks have been popping up all over the West since the 1980s, engineered with low water levels in mind. The projects typically involve a redesign of riverbeds, often with the help of concrete, boulders, sand and rocks to create bottlenecks, which create rushes of water, and "plunge pools," which add depth. All of these additions, strategically placed to encourage recreation, make not only for more exciting whitewater but also for stabilized flows, which can squeeze a little more use out of water when levels are low.
In Reno, Nevada, the river recreation economy has suffered this year. The flow of the Truckee River through downtown in mid-July was 26 cubic feet per second, which is just a step up from stagnant, thanks to this year's abysmal snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas. Private rafting companies haven't toured that section of the river, which features a whitewater park built in 2004, for more than six weeks. James Bell, owner and operator of a private rafting company, Wild Sierra Adventures, says he will likely need to cancel trips on other stretches of the Truckee soon. "This has been the worst year ever," Bell says; normally raft trips account for 60 percent of his business.
But surprisingly, people are still drawn to the slow waters downtown around the whitewater park — mostly families and children wading and swimming in the river. As drought conditions linger, "a modest splash from a man-made wave gives the river an extended life," says Bethany Drysdale, director of public relations for the Nevada Commission on Tourism. And even though raft trips are waning, the park attracts tubers who rent gear from him, says Bell, which helps his business.
On the surface, the parks might not seem like wise investments when the water gets lower. Whitewater parks are expensive to build and, though free to use, are almost always city-managed and publicly funded. Their economic impact is largely indirect.
Still, the Truckee Whitewater Park in Reno, which cost a relatively cheap $1.5 million, has become a draw for both businesses and tourists. Prior to its construction, the city's downtown section of the river had no access point, and few businesses flourished in that part of town. But the "beautification" of the river, says Ben McDonald, communications manager for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority, drew in new enterprises and created the new River Walk District. He says that area has provided a boost for Reno. "There wasn't much down there before that, but now the downtown river park is a tourist destination." According to a visitor profile study commissioned by the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority in 2007, whitewater recreation attracted 13 percent of the approximately 4.3 million people who visit Reno each year. Those visitors spend an average of $680 each. "Even though the drought has been bad this year, people have been able to get closer to the waters than they were able to before," says Peggy Nelson-Aguilar, recreation supervisor for the City of Reno.
Reno was one of the few cities in the West whose whitewater suffered from the drought this year. The "May miracle" brought a lot of rain that boosted flows in Colorado, New Mexico and much of the Midwest. (In fact, a section of the South Platte, in Colorado, was closed for part of the summer because its flows were dangerously high.) Either way, though, many cities see parks as worth the cost, one that will help out on the off-miracle years. "When it's a drought year, the park still provides a good wave," says Cathy Metz, parks and recreation director of the City of Durango. "Without a whitewater park, we would see a downfall in users."
When the Reno project was accepted in 2002, projections of the return on investment ranged from $1.9 million to $4.1 million in the first year, according to the Truckee River Recreation Plan. For comparison, Durango, Colorado, commissioned an economic impact study of its whitewater park in 2006 and found that the park and the Lower Animas River generated $18 million per year.
Beyond dollars and cents, whitewater parks offer other incentives in dry years. Around the West, engineered parks extend the paddling season, says Nathan Fey, the Colorado River stewardship director for American Whitewater. "With low flows, whitewater parks begin to address some of the demand of the varied users attracted to rivers," Fey says. The natural peaks provide recreation opportunities for seasoned paddlers, but whitewater parks keep the water exciting even as the levels dwindle. The features also attract new people to water sports. The big question, though, is how far into the future water parks can be beneficial? As of yet, there's no such thing as a drought-proof river. And, as Gary Lacy, engineer of the Truckee Whitewater Park, says: "You can't make water out of nothing."
Paige Blankenbuehler is an editorial intern at High Country News.
Follow @paigeblank]]>
Across the Western National Park System, vandalism of natural features, like rock faces and trees, has risen steadily in recent years, with more than 600 incidents reported since 2013. The hardest-hit areas are near large urban centers — such as Lake Mead National Recreation Area, a mere 39 miles from the Las Vegas Strip.
Joshua Tree, located about two and a half hours east of Los Angeles, had to close portions of its historic Barker Dam in February 2013, and, months later, it closed Rattlesnake Canyon as well. Superintendent David Smith says the vandalism ranges from run-of-the-mill high-school-type inscriptions ("Nancy loves Carl") to gang tags and unwanted works of "art," like the bright blue giraffe hikers found on a boulder in February.
This year, there have been more than 150 incidents in the Pacific West and Intermountain West regions. Such vandalism is difficult to undo, though workers can scrape off paint with spatulas, or use chemical treatments, provided they won't damage archaeological features.
People "have a desire to leave a permanent mark," says Smith, "but the difference between prehistoric times and now, is we have other mechanisms to leave a permanent record without defacing or destroying something that belongs to every American."]]>
When it comes to water use, the United States,
A. Withdraws billions of gallons more water from rivers, lakes and aquifers than it did in 1970.
B. Withdraws the same amount of water
C. Withdraws less water.
2. The state whose residents use the most domestic water (indoor and outdoor) on a per capita basis is:
A. Nevada
B. Arizona
C. Utah
D. Idaho
3. The biggest water gulping category in the United States is:
A. Golf courses
B. Thermoelectric power
C. Irrigation
3. The biggest water using category in the West is:
A. Las Vegas Fountains
B. Fracking
C. Irrigation
You'll have to read on to find the answers.
According to a US Geological Survey report on water use released last week, the U.S. in 2010 not only withdrew* less water than it did when the agency conducted its previous survey five years earlier, but it also withdrew less than it had since 1970. As the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick, a well-known water guru, put it: We appear to have reached Peak Water, decades ago.The implications are huge. The U.S. has added 105 million people since 1970, and the economy has grown tremendously. Yet we somehow have managed to shrink our overall water footprint. It's not only counter-intuitive; it's baffling. Surely, some of our water guzzling was sent overseas when we outsourced manufacturing and food production. Yet most of the savings can be attributed to simple thrift, and huge gains in efficiency in just about every sector.
It's proof that conservation is not an impediment to economic growth, and that we can limit our collective environmental impact even as the population grows, without sacrificing quality of life. And the western U.S. is leading the way.
The biggest water user in the country is thermoelectric power — most coal, natural gas and solar thermal power plants need water to produce steam to turn turbines and for cooling purposes. Over a five-year period, U.S. plants were able to cut their water withdrawals by 20 percent by installing dry-cooling technology or simply by becoming more efficient. The West has shown even more progress, cutting use by about 50 percent since 2000.
Irrigation is second in water use nationwide, but in the West, it tops the list, guzzling water at almost ten times the rate of Western power plants. Nationwide, irrigators cut water use by about 9 percent since 2005, about the same as in the West, by increasing efficiency and switching from flood irrigation to micro-irrigation, or drip, systems.
Domestic use dropped by 5 percent. Some Western cities hit hard by drought have cut water use by incentivizing homeowners to tear out their lawns, or by limiting turf at new homes. Increasing water rates on big guzzlers has also helped, as have more efficient plumbing fixtures. Las Vegas reduced a tremendous amount of waste simply by plugging the leaks in its pipes.
The mining industry, on the other hand, which includes oil and gas extraction, pulled 39 percent more water from the earth than it did in 2005, thanks to the sharp uptick in drilling. The mining industry still only accounts for about 1 percent of all withdrawals, about half of which consist of the otherwise unusable saline byproduct of oil and gas production, which is then re-injected into the well to stimulate production. But drillers use mostly fresh water for the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water used to hydraulic fracture a single well. This use shows up in North Dakota, for example, where mining's water withdrawals shot up from 5.6 million gallons per day in 2005 to 27 million in 2010. Still, that's only one-sixth of the state's withdrawals for agriculture. In Wyoming, which saw a natural gas drilling bust between 2005 and 2010, mining's water use plummeted.
All of this, and there's still plenty of waste. Las Vegas has taken great strides in conserving water over the last decade, but it still has entire neighborhoods that look like Connecticut, thanks to gluttonous lawn-watering. Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and California farmers still rely mostly on flood irrigation for their crops. And folks in some of the driest places pay the least for their water, contrary to economic principles. This is all good news, because it means that despite gains, many low-hanging fruit remain. We must pluck them before we even think of building the next dam, pipeline or groundwater pumping scheme.
*The USGS report tracks total withdrawals, or the amount pulled from the source, whether it's returned to the source or not, rather than consumptive use, which is arguably a more critical measure. Consumptive use is when the water is precluded from subsequent use (at least for a while) because it's consumed by humans or livestock or is incorporated into a product or plant. A good deal of the water sucked up by a power plant, for example, goes right back into the source, as does a portion of the water used to flood irrigate a field.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. Follow @jonnypeace
This film (and home page photograph) was produced by Conservation Media and People & Carnivores.]]>
So-called exotic loans, offering low payments for the first few years, helped fuel a housing feeding frenzy during the last half-decade. Big builders responded by extending their cookie-cutter developments farther out into the deserts. Now, the loans are all resetting to higher payments and interest rates, and folks are realizing that they couldn't afford their homes in the first place.
A wave of unpaid mortgages has ensued, hitting the West the hardest: Nevada and Colorado lead the nation in foreclosures, with six other Western states in the top 25. The effects have rippled through the housing market, sending once-flush real estate agents to find other jobs; 21 percent of real estate licenses in Nevada are now "inactive." And the number of empty houses on the market has climbed to an all-time high — up 40 percent in the West in just a year.
A strange twist has emerged in California, where drug dealers took out easy mortgages to buy upscale suburban homes, which they then converted into sophisticated marijuana plantations. Since last summer in Northern California, cops have busted 50 such marijuana McMansions. This spring, they've found a handful in Southern California.
Apparently, the neighbors' suspicions were not aroused, even though they were never invited over for cocktails and a barbecue.
But even as some suburbs decay, others rise from the sagebrush. In one Western county that's home to just 4,500 people, a developer wants to put up to 16,000 new homes on 8,600 acres. Many of the new development's 20,000 or more residents would work in a nearby city. And where is this happening? Near Reno — in Nevada, the state with the highest foreclosure rate in the nation
So much for that New West economy. Not long ago, it seems, pundits predicted that the Old West's extractive industries were dying, and would be replaced by service and real estate. Then came the energy surge, and gas wells popped up and coal boomed. (Peabody Coal's profits shot up 91 percent from 2001 to 2006, for example.) Now, even metals are coming back.
The price for a pound of copper leapt from about 65 cents in 2000 to over $3 today, thanks in part to China's bustling economy. As a result, thieves have been mining construction sites, irrigation systems and substations across the West for copper wires, tubes and pipes. That's one way to make a buck. The other is to go to work down in Arizona's Pinal Mountains, where the once-dormant copper mining economy is coming out of hibernation. Globe and Miami, east of Phoenix, are on the precipice of a new boom as large mines owned by BHP Billiton and Phelps Dodge prepare to reopen, after sitting idle for most of the past decade. Other companies also have their eyes on the area.
Logan, Utah, residents have been warned by power experts and their own mayor that if they don't stake their power future in a planned coal plant, they will risk blackouts and high rates. But the people and the city council have ignored the advice, voting in March to stay away from dirty power. The growing city of 40,000 plans instead to look into renewable energy sources.
Similar rumblings have been heard in response to electrical wholesaler Tri-State Generation and Transmission's plans to build new coal plants. In western Colorado, the Delta-Montrose Electric Association, one of Tri-State's 44 customers, refused to sign onto the Tri-State plan. The association wants to get more power from local sources like hydropower and methane vented from coal mines.
It's not exactly a revolution, but other Tri-State customers have also expressed resistance to the coal plants. And in April, Tri-State announced that it would put off plans for two coal plants, although not necessarily because of the protests.]]>
Reno, the 22-year-old protagonist of Rachel Kushner's second novel, The Flamethrowers, makes her first appearance as she flies across Nevada on her way to Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1970s. "The land was drained of color and specificity," she observes. "The faster I went, the more connected I felt to the map." A native of the city she's named for, Reno had moved to New York City several months earlier to try to become a successful artist. Now, she's returning home for two weeks to make and photograph motorcycle tracks.
The novel moves from Nevada and Bonneville to New York's Lower East Side and across the Atlantic to Italy, but because it is all seen through Reno's working-class Western lens, the reader never loses sight of the highway and unbroken sky where the novel begins. Kushner deftly connects the disparate locations, using parallel encounters with motorcycles, guns, art and films to subtly link events across time and space. Events that happen elsewhere in the world illuminate those that take place in the West: As we follow the founder of the Moto Valera company, who finds beauty in the chaos of urban Milan through the sleekness of his motorcycles, for instance, we understand why Reno quotes one of the land artist Robert Smithson's more controversial statements. Constructing his famous Spiral Jetty in a red algae-filled portion of the Great Salt Lake, Smithson remarked that "pollution and industry could be beautiful."
The Flamethrowers embraces the Western penchant for speed, the exhilaration of driving fast through empty landscapes. At the same time, the novel questions who is entitled to represent the West. Reno points out that it is "an irony but a fact" that to become a respected Western artist, she has to move to New York first. A homegrown land artist would be accused of being provincial and naive. And yet, as she says early on, "The question itself is evidence of not belonging." Once someone is conscious of deliberately representing the West, he or she ceases to effortlessly belong to it. Between these tense and provocative layers lies an expansive, irresistible story that plays out with action almost as gripping as racing a motorcycle across the Bonneville Salt Flats.]]>
Average yearly moisture: 37.02 in.*
Moisture June '05-May '06: 41.53 in.
Nine consecutive days of downpour hit western Washington this January, triggering mudslides, flooding homes and closing highways. Bremerton, a town near Seattle, notched up 16.2 inches of rain during one three-week period, a quantity that normally falls over the course of 2 months. The relentless precipitation caused $7 million in damage and led the governor to declare a state of emergency.
Average moisture: 26.78 inches Moisture June '05-May '06: 31.64 in. Winds of 117 miles per hour — the strongest recorded in the state since 1995 — swept through northeastern Oregon in mid-May, upending 12 circle irrigation systems and destroying 10,000 poplars on a tree farm near Boardman. The storms followed two days of record-breaking highs, which have since cooled down to normal summer temperatures.
Average moisture: 22.33 inches
Moisture June '05-May '06: 28.44 in.
Average moisture: 8.76 inches
Moisture June '05-May '06: 10.32 in.
Average moisture: 15.85 inches
Moisture June '05-May '06: 14.04 in.
Ski resorts in the northern half of the state celebrated the return of good snow, as storm after storm brought some of the highest snow levels of the past decade. Southern Colorado could only look on with envy, as snowfall was scant and far below average. Springtime brought bad news for water managers all over the state, however. Unusually high temperatures, no significant snowfall in May, and snowmelt-inducing dust events quickly shriveled snowpack to below-average levels statewide (HCN, 5/29/06: Dust and Snow). By June, the remaining snow level was about five times lower than normal in the southern part of the state, only slightly higher than in 2002, one of the worst years on record for wildfires.
Average moisture: 12.71 inches
Moisture June '05- May '06: 7.54 inches
Look up the word "drought" in the dictionary, and there might be a picture of Phoenix, Ariz., on June 6, when a "haboob" — a huge dust storm — engulfed portions of that sprawling city. Phoenicians have been parched this year: No precipitation fell for a record 143 days between October 2005 and March 2006, prompting some residents to flock to beauty salons in search of miracle potions to ease dry skin. This drought, coupled with four years of below-average precipitation across much of the state, has increased the risk of wildfire; more than 4,000 acres burned in February near Payson. The U.S. Department of Agriculture declared 14 out of 15 counties drought disaster areas.
Average moisture: 29.14 inches
Moisture June '05-May '06: 17.91 in. An early heat wave blasted Montana's Glacier National Park, setting a record high of 89 degrees on May 16. Rapid snowmelt produced water at the rate of one inch a day, which helped trigger a huge avalanche that churned 4,000 vertical feet down the slopes of Heaven's Peak.
Average moisture: 18.8 inches
Moisture June '05-May '06: 22.05 in.
Climate reports from Idaho this year referred repeatedly to the state's weather as a "yo-yo." Unseasonably high temperatures in May melted a big winter snowpack, which ranged from 110 to 180 percent of normal in central and southern Idaho and broke a four-year streak of below-average snowfall. Then it got cold again, and another foot of snow fell in some places. In early June, 90-degree temperatures returned, which melted more snow, prompting flood warnings in some areas and creating the best whitewater conditions in years.
Average moisture: 13.07 inches
Moisture June '05-May '06: 12.35 in.
Average moisture: 13.45 inches
Moisture June '05-May '06: 9.28 in.
After a dry and dusty winter, southern New Mexico chile farmers welcomed the lack of weeds and insects, and planted crops early. But by mid-May, hot, windy weather dried up almost five miles of the Middle Rio Grande, bumming out farmers and killing 38 endangered Rio Grande silvery minnows. About half the state is under drought advisory, with some areas already experiencing "severe drought emergency." And on June 5, Albuquerque hit 98 and Roswell 105 degrees — record highs for both cities. But maybe there's hope: The New Mexico Council of Churches asked all congregations to pray on Sunday, June 11, for an end to the drought. As we went to press, the prayers had not yet been answered.
No one at the table that day commanded more attention than Patricia Mulroy. Then 53, Mulroy was the lead negotiator for the state of Nevada and the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the powerful agency that supplies Las Vegas with its water. Partial to pantsuits and shirts with popped collars — a look she picked up from Katharine Hepburn — Mulroy has a crisp, wrinkle-proof bearing and an often unnerving intensity.
For her, the stakes were especially high. Las Vegas' population was exploding, but the city had rights to less than 2 percent of the river's water, and that was running out fast. The one resource Mulroy had in abundance was money: In 2005, the Water Authority would rake in more than $363 million.
Inside the Wyndham, negotiations reached an impasse as representatives from Arizona and Colorado locked horns over differing interpretations of a key part of the complex body of law that governs the river. "It just went on and on and on," says assistant New Mexico Attorney General Steve Farris. "And the longer it went on, you could just see Pat getting angrier and angrier and angrier."
Finally, Mulroy had enough. "I'd heard all the nonsense I was going to listen to," she remembers. "And I blew my cork."
Bristling, she rose abruptly and warned everyone that they stood at the brink of war. "She said, 'Nevada has very little water, but the one thing I do have is millions and millions of dollars, and I can afford to spend years in the Supreme Court fighting you all,' " remembers Farris. " 'So you need to figure out whether you're going to help me out — or we're going to court.' "
Then she stormed out, headed for the next flight back to Vegas. Everyone sat in stunned silence. "It was just like a bomb had gone off in the room," says John Entsminger, then one of Mulroy's lead attorneys.
Suddenly, Mulroy burst back in — to retrieve the cellphone she'd left behind in her fury. Then she turned and disappeared once more, the heavy door slamming behind her.
This was classic Pat Mulroy: brash, blunt, combustible and sometimes her own worst enemy. Yet by last February, when she retired after 25 years as Nevada's top water boss, Mulroy had challenged much of the legalistic dogma on the river and forced a radical new style of deal-making in the face of crisis.
"She really was a major force in transforming the way the states worked on the Colorado River," says Bruce Babbitt, U.S. secretary of Interior under President Clinton.
Today, the drought that the water bosses were contemplating in 2005 is dragging into its 16th year, and scientists recognize it as one of the worst in more than 1,200 years. Mulroy was pugnacious, but she also argued for a spirit of flexibility and shared sacrifice. And in doing so, she helped launch a quiet revolution that will shape Colorado River politics far into the future, and perhaps provide a path to safety in the face of intensifying scarcity. Yet even as that transformation ripples forward, a moment of decision is nearing in another of Mulroy's campaigns — a multibillion-dollar water project that stands starkly at odds with much of what she preached.
Mulroy came to the world of Western water as an outsider. Born in Germany in 1953, Elizabeth Patricia Gallagher was the daughter of a German mother who had herself been born in Java. Her father was a civilian contractor who helped run U.S. airbases. Mulroy also lived in Libya for several years. Her childhood left her with a cosmopolitan sensibility. "As a family, we had always viewed the world as one place," she told me last March, in a conference room just outside her former office.
Mulroy first came to the city that would become her longtime home in 1974, on a scholarship to University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she would earn her bachelor's and master's degrees in German Expressionist literature. She began a doctoral program at Stanford, but ran out of money and returned to Las Vegas in 1978.
"She was broke," says Richard Bunker, Clark County manager at the time, who hired Mulroy as his assistant and became her political godfather. "And that's when I hired her at the county." Mulroy quickly proved her mettle. "She was the hatchet man," he says. "She had a tough reputation."
In 1978, she also met Robert Mulroy, a county finance manager. On weekends, Bob worked as a ski patroller at the nearby Lee Canyon Ski Area, and Pat rode in the rescue toboggan as a mock victim. The two married in 1981; their son, Ryan, was born in 1986, their daughter, Kelley, in 1987.
In 1985, Mulroy became deputy general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, one of seven water agencies that supply Vegas and its suburbs. By 1989, she was general manager — and found herself with a fight on her hands. The seven agencies were running out of water and squabbling over what remained. "Southern Nevada was in meltdown," she says. "It was acrimonious and ugly."
It took three years to find "peace and a pathway forward," as she puts it, by convincing the other agencies to cooperate under the banner of a new superagency called the Southern Nevada Water Authority, whose primary goal would be to ensure water supplies for the entire metropolitan area. From the start, it was clear that Mulroy would be in charge. "There was no way in hell," says George Forbes, then Boulder City manager, "that she was going to play Number Two to anybody."
Then Mulroy turned outward. In the 1920s, when the Colorado River was originally divvied up, Las Vegas was little more than a railroad stop, and Nevada was a sparsely populated desert. The other six states that share the river received nearly all the water — and the power. Mulroy was determined to change that by challenging the so-called "law of the river," an amalgamation of more than four-dozen statutes, international treaties and court decrees that other states' managers adhered to, Mulroy notes sarcastically, as if they were Moses' tablets. With southern Nevada's warring agencies now united, Mulroy was ready to take on the other states. "When we said something," she says, "they knew we meant it."
For his part, Bunker likens Mulroy's entrance into the broader realm of Colorado River politics to unleashing "a flash-bang grenade" on a bunch of "old, mossback, gray-headed guys."
Mulroy's grand entrance came at a critical time for Las Vegas, which was well on its way into a major boom. In 1992, when Mulroy took charge of the Water Authority, roughly 840,000 people lived in the metropolitan area. Over the next decade, that number would nearly double. By 2002, Mulroy fully expected to have hit the limits of Nevada's full Colorado River allocation of 300,000 acre-feet — roughly 98 billion gallons per year — even as the city continued to swell.
So she launched a campaign to wrest more water from the Colorado. Roughly 70 percent of the river's water is used for agriculture, and many urban water agencies see that as a reservoir on which they might draw if necessary. But there's very little farming in southern Nevada, so Mulroy was forced to look toward other states. This was sacrilege in a system where each state traditionally guarded its own allocation of the river as if it was more precious than gold.
Her sights eventually fell on Chevron, which held rights to water that it hoped to use to extract oil shale in western Colorado. The company needed a way to put the water to use until the shale industry took off. One way to do that might be by leasing it to Las Vegas.
That, however, would run headlong into a hallowed proscription in the state of Colorado. Owing to the structure of the law of the river, the upstream, Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — and their downstream, Lower Basin counterparts — Nevada, Arizona and California — form two separate negotiating blocs, which are set squarely in opposition to each other on key legal controversies. And Colorado officials have long maintained that, under the law of the river, transfers between the Upper and Lower basins are illegal.
Though it would be decades before Colorado needed its full river allocation, officials there saw Chevron's water as critical to the state's future economic development. If Las Vegas came to depend on the water, they feared, Colorado might lose its rights through a sort of adverse possession.
So when Jim Lochhead, a strategy advisor for Colorado, heard about Mulroy's negotiations with Chevron, he quickly booked a flight to Vegas and delivered a warning: Back off. "She would have gotten years and years of litigation," Lochhead said last year. "And she wouldn't have gotten any water."
Mulroy turned her attention to the safer territory of the Lower Basin. Water managers there were already bandying about a series of interstate "banking" proposals, under which the states could store water for each others' use. Both Arizona and California were interested, but Nevada's need was urgent.
Finally, in 2001, Mulroy got what she wanted: The Southern Nevada Water Authority inked a deal under which it would pay a counterpart in Arizona to buy water from farms there and store it underground. In return, the Water Authority could, in later years, take an equivalent portion of Arizona's share of the Colorado River directly from Lake Mead, the massive reservoir just east of Las Vegas from which the city already draws most of its water.
Though it was pitched as a banking deal, it was really an exercise in figuring out how to move water across state lines. "If you think about it, it's pretty much the exact same thing as us going to Arizona and buying water and moving it to Nevada," says David Donnelly, who was Mulroy's engineering and operations chief and the principal architect of this deal. "Except in this case, Arizona buys it, takes the water and banks it for us — and then we get it back in the future."
It was also the first federally sanctioned deal for a water transfer between two states. But Mulroy has only ever spoken about it euphemistically because transfers, even within the Lower Basin, are so politically charged. "Don't ever call it a transfer," she scolded during a 2008 interview. "It's a banking agreement. That thing will disappear on us tomorrow if we call it a transfer."
She had learned a crucial lesson, however. In the years that followed, Mulroy would — despite her reputation as a woman who didn't mince words — speak an increasingly convoluted lingua franca that would eventually include enigmas like "intentionally created unused apportionment." It sounds like gobbledygook, but it was all for a larger end.
"I learned it's not what you do, it's what you call it," Mulroy told me. "You find the right name for it, and you can do anything."
The opaque language bought managers leeway to try new approaches within the arcane system of interstate water management on the river. That helped Mulroy in her quest for water to sustain Vegas' runaway growth. Ultimately, however, it would help all the Colorado River water bosses weather a much bigger looming disaster.
The dawn of the 21st century brought signs of a grim new reality. The winter of 1999-2000 was dry. So was the next one. Then, during the winter of 2001-2002, snowpack in the river's Rocky Mountain headwaters — source of most of its water — plunged to just a quarter of average.
For decades, bright minds have warned that the compact that divides up the river's water — based on some of its wettest years — promises considerably more than the river can actually deliver. Add the corrosive impacts of climate change, and it's likely that, by mid-century, water managers will have to make do with one-fifth to one-quarter less water than they have legal rights to. By 2002, that problem was becoming alarmingly real for Mulroy.
"We were holding out hope that there would be a late spring storm, and it was not happening," she says.
On a Friday morning in April that year, Mulroy's top managers gathered. "Pat walked into the meeting and just said: 'We've got to have a plan,' " John Entsminger remembers. What had long been a rule of thumb for Mulroy suddenly became gospel: "We have to live 20 or 30 years in the future," she says. "And we have to assume the worst."
That year, the water level in Lake Mead, one of two giant reservoirs on the river's mainstem, would fall 25 feet. Were it to drop another 100, one of Las Vegas' two water intakes would go dry and the city's supply would be roughly halved. Sixty-five feet below that, the second intake would suck air.
The Water Authority immediately put itself on a water diet, ramping up a "cash-for-grass" program that ultimately paid Las Vegans $189 million to tear out their lawns, cutting per-person water use in the city by about a third. In 2005, the Authority approved construction of an $817 million "third straw" that would draw water from deeper within Lake Mead than the existing intakes could reach.
Meanwhile, the river's flows kept fading — and tensions between the states reached a fever pitch. Thanks to a 40-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior has the power to declare an official shortage in the Lower Basin, which would effectively allow him or her to take control of river management. In May 2005, then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton gave the feuding water bosses an ultimatum: Figure out how to deal with the drought, or face federal intervention.
Norton made the threat, but Mulroy drove people into deal-making mode. "You need somebody to be yelling at the top of their lungs," says David Hayes, deputy secretary of the Interior under both Clinton and Obama. "And Pat was very willing to provide that service" — mostly by threatening to sue her colleagues.
Because fights over the Colorado River are interstate disputes, they automatically go before the Supreme Court. And, at least in part because water cases are such arcane, complex pieces of litigation, the Court has done a famously poor job of resolving them. For most water managers, sending river issues to the Court was a dangerous crapshoot. Mulroy, though, had little to lose and much to gain — which gave her a critical strategic advantage.
"Mulroy was willing to be really tough and invite people to roll the dice," says Peter Culp, an Arizona attorney who has been closely involved in Colorado River policymaking over the past decade. "She'd suggest that that was a really dumb thing to do — but if they wanted to roll the dice, she'd go find some.
"That uncertainty," Culp adds, "was a big driver for cooperation."
That was exactly the point Mulroy was trying to make when she stormed out of the Albuquerque airport hotel in 2005. Even as she was slamming doors behind her, she knew that the only hope for a durable solution lay in the same sense of strength in unity that had driven the creation of the Water Authority 15 years earlier. "She obviously advocated passionately for Las Vegas. But she realized that she wasn't going to get anywhere if she didn't look at how she was going to help solve some of the bigger issues on the river," says Lochhead. "Essentially, we were going to find solutions that protected each other."
So began a marathon three-year round of negotiations, whose intensity did little to curb Mulroy's appetite for Benson & Hedges DeLuxe Ultra Lights. But the resulting agreement, finalized in 2007 and carefully pitched as a set of "interim guidelines" that will expire in 2026, lays out a damage-control plan for when the river finally sinks into official shortage.
Key to the plan is a series of trigger points that will force the Lower Basin states to throttle back their water use. As the surface level of Lake Mead — currently at 1,088 feet above sea level — sinks below 1,075, 1,050 and 1,025 feet, the states will face progressively greater reductions in the amount of water they can pull from the river. Those cutbacks will sting, but they'll slow the rate at which the shortage worsens — giving managers like Mulroy more options for managing the crash. "If I'm sitting at a negotiating table and I'm agreeing to a certain level of shortage," she explains, "I have a backup plan at home that tells me how I'm going to manage through that."
The shortage agreement has several components. One of the most important allows the Lower Basin states to put money toward water efficiency projects, fallowing farm fields, desalinating seawater, or "importing" water from elsewhere; they can then sock that water away in Lake Mead. That will help boost water levels and thereby postpone the moment the reservoir falls below 1,075 feet — the first trigger for shortage.
As a whole, the agreement is essentially a strategy to help water bosses stall for time — and pray for snow. Think of it as the roulette-wheel theory of drought survival: Each year that the states manage to stave off a shortage, or keep it from deepening to the next tier of cutbacks, they buy themselves another spin of the wheel. That means one more shot at the jackpot: a big winter snowpack that refills the reservoirs — or at least brings enough water to buy yet one more spin of the wheel.
"We're headed for worse shortages," Mulroy says. "If we can move water around, and backfill other people's shortages, and take advantage of every opportunity that comes along, then we've got a better chance of adapting to what is invariably going to happen on that river system."
Mulroy was by no means the only person responsible for the deal. It took a whole raft of open-minded, adaptable counterparts from the other states, many of whom maintain far lower public profiles than Mulroy. But as her negotiating counterpart and cautious ally Jim Lochhead — the man who flew to Vegas in 1993 to confront Mulroy — puts it: "It wouldn't have happened if she weren't there."
The agreement could mark the beginning of a new era of hydraulic inventiveness. Water managers are less and less likely to try to engineer themselves out of a problem with massive, Hoover Dam-style projects. Instead, they're becoming adept at shuffling a finite — and shrinking — supply of water around to cover the most desperate shortfalls. In that sense, the 2007 shortage agreement opened the Rubik's Cube era of water in the West. And while it was born from crisis as a damage-control measure, the deal may prove to be a first step toward long-term sustainability.
Just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, the river once flowed to the sea in the Colorado River Delta. But after more than 80 years of re-plumbing for cities and farms, the river has rarely reached the Gulf of California, and the Delta has turned from a fabled Eden into a kind of wasteland.
In 2000 and 2005, Mulroy and her Western counterparts were entangled in two lawsuits, which argued that water operations in the U.S. were harming populations of U.S.-protected endangered species that happened to live across the border in the Delta. The water agencies ultimately prevailed, though not without an eleventh-hour congressional rider.
What's surprising, then, is that even as Mulroy battled in court, she simultaneously urged that Mexico's concerns and the Delta itself — which she called "a black eye for the whole river community" — be included in discussions about the river. Mexico has rights to about 9 percent of the river's water, but for many U.S. water managers, the neighboring country "might as well have been an alien planet," Mulroy says. Soon after the turn of the 21st century, though, Mexico began insisting that it be treated as an equal partner, which meant something had to be done to restore the Delta. "My attitude is: Let's put the skunk in the middle of the table," says Mulroy. "Let's talk about it. And let's deal with it."
In fact, as long ago as 1998, Mulroy had started sending water bosses across the border to tour the Delta. Members of her staff would drive roughly 1,000 miles to ferry water managers from the San Diego airport to Mexicali, Mexico, and then farther south to the river's end.
Soon after the 2007 shortage agreement was finalized, U.S. water bosses began another five years of intense negotiation with their Mexican counterparts. That led to Minute 319, an amendment to a nearly 70-year-old water treaty between the two nations. At its heart was a provision for a manmade flood designed to restart some of the natural ecological dynamics of the Delta.
Yet when that so-called pulse flow was finally released last March, Mulroy wasn't there to watch. Her prize had always been something else. Minute 319 also allows U.S. water agencies to fund water-efficiency investments on Mexican farms and canals in exchange for water that — as under the Arizona banking and 2007 agreements — they can use in their own systems.
"She saw opportunity in the Delta," Lochhead says — for adding yet more flexibility to the system to avoid shortage, and to protect Vegas' supply. "She also saw potential political danger."
The Delta was but one issue in which Mulroy's enlightened rhetoric was a means to self-interested ends. Mulroy was initially agnostic about climate change. But 2002, that annus horribilis when the snowpack failed, changed her mind. "The one thing that always kept me awake at night," she says, "was two 2002s, back-to-back, with the reservoirs already down as far as they were."
Mulroy went on to argue, far more openly than any other water boss, that it was time to take climate change seriously. "Are we just going to pretend we're Nero and play the fiddle?" she said last March. "Or are we going to proactively avoid a catastrophe?"
Mulroy realized that the world was changing in ways water managers couldn't yet fathom, and she went out of her way to court climate scientists like the University of Arizona's Jonathan Overpeck. In 2009, he and his Colorado colleague, Brad Udall, flew to Las Vegas for a climate change symposium at the Palms Casino. Mulroy spent the afternoon talking with them before shuttling them back to the airport in her GMC Yukon. Overpeck was impressed with her concern. "I think a lot of water managers don't want the public to worry," he says. "Pat understood that there's a real problem here, and that if we don't talk about it, we won't solve it."
Mulroy was feeling the heat herself, in every sense of the word. Despite her longtime determination to live a quarter-century in the future, she was still scrambling to keep up with falling reservoir levels: She would ultimately spend nearly $1.5 billion on a series of massive water intakes to pull water from lower and lower levels in Lake Mead.
In many ways, Mulroy symbolizes the era in which we all are at the mercy of a hostile climate. Her credo of dependence and cooperation could become a sort of rallying cry for the 21st century's grim realities: We are all vulnerable, but we are in this together.
"We all, as a larger basin, are going to be short," Mulroy said in a notable talk at the University of Colorado law school in 2013. "And we all, as a larger basin, are going to have to bring everything to the table to bring almost 40 million people, and productive agriculture, and national parks, and recreational uses, and tribal nations, and endangered species through the knothole."
Yet Mulroy's proselytizing about that perilous knothole would serve a larger purpose: It would become the mainstay of the campaign for her biggest and most controversial idea.
Mulroy always had a Plan B for getting more water. Back in 1989, she made a dramatic opening move: She applied for permits to pump 800,000 acre-feet of groundwater — more than two-and-a-half times Las Vegas' share of the Colorado — from a 20,000-square-mile expanse of cattle country in eastern Nevada. The area is far off the beaten path, in a starkly beautiful world of wide valleys dotted with sagebrush and winterfat, ranch outposts, desert springs and the craggy peaks and bristlecone pines of Great Basin National Park. It's also home to three national wildlife refuges and at least five federally protected endangered species, including several rare desert fish.
The $1.5 billion project, which was the largest groundwater-pumping effort ever proposed in the U.S., opened a gigantic rift between Las Vegas and rural Nevadans. Mulroy backed off the effort to seek permits — until the dry year of 2002, and pressure from the other Colorado River water bosses, spurred her to resurrect it.
Mulroy repeatedly insisted that she wouldn't actually build the project unless forced to. In 2013, she told the state Legislature that it "is a project of last resort. That means nothing else is possible: There is no way to desalt water; there is no way to exchange water; nothing else is possible to save Lake Mead." Even so, the Water Authority has already spent more than $133 million pushing the project forward.
And last March, Mulroy invoked the threat of climate change as justification for building it: "Cities, in order to adapt to climate change, have to diversify where their water comes from — period, end of conversation."
Despite a shoestring budget, the project's foes have already managed to drag the permitting process out for a decade by fighting it in state and federal court. And even as regulators and the Water Authority have whittled back the project's scale, its estimated cost has ballooned to at least $15.5 billion.
Mulroy's groundwater crusade has constantly forced her to contend with the ghost of William Mulholland, the notorious Los Angeles water boss who siphoned water more than 200 miles from the rural Owens Valley through the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early 20th century, ruining the valley's farming communities. Mulroy hopes for a better legacy. She has long argued that if Las Vegas does have to tap the groundwater in eastern Nevada, it can recharge extra water into the aquifer when it's available. Meanwhile, she says, the Water Authority can work with local communities to ensure they're not harmed.
"The days of just going into an area, voiding it of its water resources, and letting happen what will — that can't happen anymore," says Mulroy. "There has to be a balance."
Yet Mulroy has steadfastly refused to agree to objective triggers that would decrease or shut off pumping if it begins harming springs or ranches in rural Nevada. In fact, the legal fight against the project now hinges on this very issue. Without explicitly defined triggers, there's no legally binding assurance that the Water Authority won't simply pump the aquifer to exhaustion — which would make the groundwater project an enterprise completely at odds with the credo of shared fate, accommodation and mutual sacrifice that Mulroy urged on the Colorado River.
This is the darkest shadow hanging over Mulroy's legacy, and it has caused deep unease within her own camp. Steve Sisolak is the chairman of the Clark County Commission, which encompasses the Las Vegas metropolitan area, and since 2009, he has also been a member of the Water Authority board. The more he learned about the project's potential impacts and the resistance against it, the more worried he became. "It was like: Wait a minute, this isn't making sense to me," Sisolak remembers thinking. "This isn't a good idea."
The challenges to the proposal, he says, were greater than anyone had anticipated — yet Mulroy refused to back down. "Instead of taking a step back and saying, 'OK: Let's re-evaluate,' " he says, "it was like, 'No: We're just going to put our foot on the pedal harder to make this happen.' "
Today, Colorado River bosses face the frightening possibility of being caught in a "megadrought" so bad that, even if they do look 25 years ahead, the end may still be beyond view. And while the new generation of Colorado River agreements is unprecedented, those deals can only delay and soften the crash; they can't prevent it.
It's not hard to imagine a point where the possibilities of this new style of cooperative problem-solving will run out, when even the best minds on the river are outmatched by the pitiless cycles of the trade winds and the oceans, aggravated by an atmosphere full of greenhouse gases. Mulroy has raised the prospect of the drought becoming so bad that it will necessitate "outmigrating 40 million people" from the Southwest.
Yet there's still a tremendous safety net for the trillion-and-a-half-dollar, primarily urban, regional economy the river feeds: that 70 percent of the river's water that flows to roughly 5.7 million acres of farms. A 2013 study by Michael Cohen and colleagues at the Pacific Institute estimates that in the Colorado River Basin, irrigated pasture and forage — mostly alfalfa for cattle — uses an amount equal to about a third of the water in the river. Freeing up just 6 percent of that, through increased water efficiency or outright water sales, would double Las Vegas' share of the river.
Politically, it would not be easy. But the reality is that the Southern Nevada Water Authority and other agencies are already plumbed into a system that could theoretically provide more water than they'll need for centuries, even in the face of megadroughts and climate change. And contrary to popular rhetoric, Western cities can turn to farms for water without killing off farming. California is a quarter century into a successful effort to develop, test and refine ways of structuring water transfers that allow farming to continue.
On the Colorado, the new generation of water agreements that Mulroy and her fellow water bosses have negotiated has set the stage for much broader-scale transfers from farms to cities, which will be especially critical in enabling cities to ride out a deepening drought. It's still far from a wide-open market, but many of the old taboos are breaking down as the law of the river is revised, rewritten and adapted for a drier future.
All of which points up a central paradox of Pat Mulroy's personality. She has long been known for making outrageous moves. In 1989, she launched the groundwater project in the face of widespread furor within Nevada. In 1993, she poked a finger in Colorado's eye when she tried to buy water from Chevron. In 2006, she seemingly threatened to have Nevada's top water regulator fired — something she later denied. In 2009, as Barack Obama was about to take office, Mulroy suggested that the federal government tap the Mississippi River — more than 1,300 miles from Las Vegas — in a New Deal-style program to create jobs and ease water shortages in the West. In 2011, when the Mississippi flooded, Mulroy pitched the idea again.
"What we've said, continually," she told me last March, "is that there's not a single option too far out there to be worth looking at."
Yet all of that may simply have been a smokescreen for the delicate chess setup — for concepts like farm transfers — that she was doing much closer to home. Ultimately, Mulroy's real M.O. was incrementalism: a tireless determination to slowly expand what was possible within the law of the river. Rather than taking a sledgehammer to the Colorado River's sacred tablets, she assiduously covered them with sticky notes and asterisks.
Cumulatively, Mulroy was always pushing a bigger program. All of the innovations since the drought began — while carefully pitched as pilot programs and interim measures — have been small advances in Mulroy's broader initiative, launched more than two decades ago, to open up the law of the river to greater possibilities. That, in large part, is her legacy: pushing everyone into the new era of aquatic contortionism that it will take to fit everything through the knothole.
This is the true revolution on the river. And although water managers remain profoundly reticent about the critical role that water transfers play in this transformation, the proof lies in the rapidly accumulating addenda to the law of the river. In their 2007 "interim" agreement, water bosses included a little-remarked provision that could allow Nevada, Arizona or California to buy water from farms in another Lower Basin state, as long as all three states agree. In 2012, Minute 319 added Mexico as yet another place the Lower Basin states could turn for water.
Some of these provisions lie dormant — for now. But "if the system's dropping like a rock and Southern Nevada's out there running around with a checkbook," says one person who helped write the post-drought agreements, "a lot of farmers are going to take advantage of that."
In fact, over the past eight months, agencies have developed two new programs under which they hope to begin moving water later this year. In July, the Water Authority, Metropolitan, the Central Arizona Project, Denver Water and federal Bureau of Reclamation approved an $11 million pilot program to fund water-efficiency improvements on farms or pay farmers to temporarily idle their fields, and thereby infuse the system with an additional 75,000 acre-feet of "shared" water over the next two years. That will boost the odds that drought and climate change don't push the reservoir levels past the crucial shortage triggers. In October, the U.S. began discussions with Mexico about that country's participation in the program. And in December, the Lower Basin states, urban agencies and the federal government approved the Pilot Drought Response Actions program, which gives the states an additional vehicle to fund efficiency improvements or fallowing programs and add another 1.5 to 3 million acre-feet of water to Lake Mead over the next five years, which the water agencies can then individually recover later.
It's now indisputable that farm transfers will help shield 40 million people from the worst effects of catastrophic drought. The wider extent to which they might supply future urban growth remains a persistent riddle.
Mulroy is exceedingly careful to note that farm-to-city transfers "can't be viewed as the easy solution." But much goes unspoken on the river. And even Mulroy — the consummate incrementalist — allows that, sometimes, real change comes only with the convulsive push of a crisis.
"Sometimes, you need to look straight into the eyes of disaster in order to start rethinking," she told me last March. "No issue will be resolved until the time is right and the circumstances are right. People will not change unless they absolutely have to."
Mulroy retired on Feb. 6, 2014. Her husband, Bob, is suffering health problems, and as Mulroy put it soon after she stepped down: "There's no good time. It's just time."
John Entsminger, whom Mulroy hired in 1999, replaced her as head of the Water Authority. Mulroy now holds fellowship positions with the Brookings Institution and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and she's a member of the powerful Nevada Gaming Commission, which oversees the state's casino industry.
No agency on the Colorado River bears the mark of a single person as much as the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and Mulroy's legacy will live on for decades. But Lake Mead continues to fall, and the groundwater project lurks in the wings, potent and explosive: a rocket-powered relic of the mega-engineering era, wreathed in whiffs of spraypaint and grease, waiting for liftoff. This, in contrast to Mulroy's studied incrementalism on the river, is her go-for-broke project: the moon shot.
This summer, Lake Mead could drop below 1,075 feet. Though an official shortage won't be declared until it's that low on January 1 of a given year, Mulroy has long said that when Lake Mead does hit 1,075 feet, the Water Authority must decide whether to fully commit to the groundwater project.
That project has been known variously as the Cooperative Water Project; the "in-state" project; the Northern Resource System; and the Groundwater Development Project. No name that's been tried has ever really stuck, and none does justice to its ambition.
Why not call it the Patricia Mulroy Groundwater Extraction and Delivery System? Why not turn all 263 miles of pipeline, the 245 miles of high-voltage power lines and all the pumps thundering in the desert, into a monument to Mulroy's mind — to the idea that the future need not repeat the past, and that, with the benefit of hindsight from the Owens Valley, things really can be done differently? With her name on the line, perhaps it really could be run as a different kind of project: a paragon of balance and a monument to sustainability.
Still, Mulroy helped blaze a trail into a new era, where real innovation comes in the kinds of packages that can't be affixed with commemorative plaques. Plenty of ambitious Western water projects endure today only as yellowing blueprints, historians' curiosities, ghosts from a different era. Ultimately, perhaps, the greatest testament to Pat Mulroy's vision will be that the project that would have borne her name finds a home among all the dream ventures that were never built — because they didn't have to be.
This is the first in an occasional series that looks at the people and ideas helping the West better understand and better use its water, as the threat of prolonged drought looms. The series will highlight possible solutions to the specific problems brought on by the drought — from the
way we allocate water to the way we consume or conserve it. Yes,
there's less water than we'd like. And yet, there's more than enough, if we're wise, to keep the glass half full.
Matt Jenkins has covered water for High Country News since 2001. He currently writes from Washington, D.C.
This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.]]>
J.C. Davis pilots a white sedan through a late-vintage planned community about 10 miles southeast of the Las Vegas Strip. Nearly empty streets curve gently past architectural features tinted the bland beige shades mandated by each development – a khaki wall here, tan homes there, a sand-colored CVS pharmacy – like lithium for the eyes. Just past a biscuit-colored Starbucks, Davis parks on a street that, for now, marks the dividing line between suburbia and open desert. Here, workers put the finishing touches on a row of closely snuggled, nearly identical stucco houses, colored – you guessed it – beige, and capped with trendy tan tile roofs.
From the passenger seat, I gaze in bafflement. Ostensibly, Davis, the gregarious, clean-cut public information officer for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, is here to show me a "Water Smart" home. I had pictured a one-off prototype that would never really be lived in – some sort of rammed-earth, recycled-cardboard affair complete with composting toilet and a hairy, unwashed tenant.
Instead, I get Inspirada, a new-urbanist community conceived in 2004, when houses were sprouting in southern Nevada at a rate of more than three per hour. On 1,900 acres bought from the Bureau of Land Management for $577 million, a consortium of developers planned 11,500 homes arranged in seven "villages," each with its own theme. The community was meant to evoke pre-World War II America, with a town square, parks and a boutique casino. Yet even as the Desert Mermaids frolicked in a community pool and an American Idol star belted out "The Star-Spangled Banner" during the 2007 grand opening, the whole "build it and they will buy" credo was evaporating under the desert sun. The Southwestern housing market twirled into free fall, and Inspirada's developers ultimately went bankrupt with less than 700 homes built. But with the market making a sputtering comeback, Inspirada is reviving.
Every house that national builder KB Homes erected in the development is part of the Southern Nevada Water Authority's voluntary Water Smart program, meaning it uses an average of just 94,000 gallons annually – about half the water guzzled by older Las Vegas homes, and 20 percent less than those of similar vintage. "Short of living in a high-rise, it's about as efficient as you're going to get," says Davis, whose organization, composed of seven districts, manages water for some 2 million people in the greater Las Vegas metro area.
This is sustainability, Sin City style. It sounds like a bad joke. After all, this is the place visited by 39 million people yearly, all of whom gobble ghastly amounts of carbon-spewing fossil fuels to drive or fly here. This is where, for just $250,000, you can push the button that makes a 22-million-gallon fountain ejaculate, or play one of 61 iridescently green golf courses scattered across the sprawl in a region that gets 4.2 inches of rain annually. Here, urban revitalization involves stringing a canopy of 12.5 million lights over a city street, creating a seizure-inducing display whose effects can be tempered only with the help of 96-ounce cocktails. Don't worry; the drinks are cleverly designed to hang around your neck, keeping your hands free for playing slots and smoking.
"Vegas and sustainability are two words that don't typically come together in most people's minds," admits Las Vegas Sustainability Director Tom Perrigo in what may be the diplomatic understatement of the year. But lately, this paragon of excess has been making noteworthy strides in both the public and private sector, from the city government pledging to make its collective facilities "net zero," to resorts embracing LEED-certified construction.
Of course, the real test for the nation's driest city is water. Ninety percent of the Vegas metro area's supply comes from the nearby Colorado River, which is shackled by a 14-year drought. The hard limits to decades of conspicuous consumption are clearly visible just 30 miles from the city, where Lake Mead – a reservoir on the river – is so low that a hundred vertical feet of its craggy banks are exposed. Even as the Water Authority scours far and wide for new sources, it has also quietly cultivated an old-fashioned alternative: efficiency.
Beyond Inspirada, my tour takes me to a wastewater treatment facility that, after removing all the crap, sends clean water back out to golf courses and parks. I sit down with a group of nerdy engineers – rock stars in their field – whose job it is to find and plug leaks in the 4,100 miles of water lines below the city, saving hundreds of millions of gallons each year. At a golf course, I try to talk green speeds and turf lengths with a course superintendent who ripped out acres of grass. And I see first-hand just how much fat some of the mega-casino resorts have managed to cut from their energy and water budgets.
Ultimately, I find evidence that the city is, indeed, becoming vastly more efficient and may even be inching towards so-called sustainability. And it's not in spite of the raw and uninhibited consumption that has made Vegas a legend, but, ironically, because of it.
If there is a Garden of Eden here, the place that gave Las Vegas life and from which it was ultimately exiled, it lies west of downtown, where wide, strip-mall-lined thoroughfares hem in neighborhoods of classic, low-slung ranch homes and palm-shaded mini mansions, mostly built in the '60s and '70s. Across a busy road from what is now a mega-shopping mall, cool, fresh water once bubbled up from a spring that an 1888 traveler described as "five yards in diameter and of unfathomable depth … below whose sparkling surface it was impossible to sink on account of the strong current that boiled up from the bottom."
In this unforgiving landscape, which gets half the rain Phoenix does, that spring made old Las Vegas an oasis, drawing the railroad and giving life to orchards and then a small city. Two dozen productive wells were sunk nearby, along with hundreds of smaller ones around the Las Vegas Valley. The population bloomed, and by 1962, had sucked the spring dry. Yet Las Vegans refused to give up their oasis. And for a while, they didn't have to.
The 1922 Compact that divided the waters of the Colorado River gave Nevada 300,000 acre-feet per year, far less than other states but seemingly enough for a sparsely populated state mostly occupied by federal land and bombing ranges. When the second intake in Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the nation, was completed in 1983, Las Vegas Valley urbanites were able to take advantage of the state's entire Colorado River allotment.
Meanwhile, the advent of air conditioning caused the Southwest to boom. The population of Clark County, Vegas' home, was 273,000 in 1970. By 1990, it was nearly 800,000. Just as electricity imported from coal plants across the Southwest provided refuge from the broiling heat, Colorado River water kept the place verdant with golf courses, fountains and fake waterfalls. By the late '80s, each Las Vegan used more water than just about anyone else – almost 400 gallons per day compared to Phoenix's gluttonous 315 gallons. "The obsession in Vegas isn't money or sin," writes Charles Fishman in his 2011 The Big Thirst. It's water: "displaying it, unfurling it, playing with it, flaunting it." Or, as journalist Jacques Leslie observed after seeing the Bellagio fountain: Water in Vegas "is displayed more lasciviously than sex."
By the time charismatic, no-holds-barred water czar Pat Mulroy took over the then-newly formed Southern Nevada Water Authority in 1991, it was clear something had to give. Unlike Phoenix, Las Vegas no longer had nearby farms from which it could buy water. Either the 1922 Compact needed to be renegotiated – unlikely, given California and Arizona's growth – or Vegas would have to limit its own growth, unthinkable given homebuilding's pre-bust importance to the regional economy.
So Mulroy set out to prove that water does indeed flow uphill towards money, grabbing rights to 800,000 acre-feet from across the state, including groundwater under expansive valleys more than 200 miles to the north. But environmentalists, Indian tribes, ranchers and the two Utah counties that lie atop the aquifer have all bitterly fought "Pat's Pipeline." In December, a judge ordered the state engineer to reconsider his approval for the groundwater pumping. And with the southern Nevada economy still gasping from the recession, Las Vegas has a lot less gravity-defying cash available to build a project that could cost as much as $15 billion. The city's current share of water isn't guaranteed, either: Mead's level could drop below one of its two existing intakes by 2015 thanks to drought and growing demand. The Water Authority is spending $817 million building a new intake on the bottom of the reservoir, but if the climate continues to warm and dry, even that may prove inadequate.
Unlike many water buffaloes, however, Mulroy has, in many respects, also embraced camel-style conservation. With a bit of prodding, her constituents have followed. Per capita water use has dropped to 219 gallons – 40 percent less than in 1989. Between 2002 and 2012, the Las Vegas Valley grew by more than 400,000 people and added 25,000 hotel rooms. Annual visitation rose by 5 million, and yet total annual water use dropped 29 billion gallons.
Today, the Springs Preserve, a park, museum and educational center, sits about where the old fount bubbled up, and serves as a monument to the spring, a condemnation of the profligate water use of the past and a harbinger of a more efficient future. Next to solar panel-shaded parking lots and botanical gardens filled with native plants – panamint liveforever, scarlet hedgehog, desert spinystar – sits the Desert Living Center, a large, beautifully designed rammed-earth building with a catchment system to utilize what little rain falls from the all too sunny skies, and wetlands that filter water for re-use. Inside, kids can watch a dramatic flash flood simulation, crawl through a compost pile and play a video game whose goal is to tear up as much grass as possible, an activity, it turns out, that is key to Vegas' water-saving success.
Back in Inspirada, Bradd Robison, a shiny-pated, aviator glasses-wearing KB Homes representative, escorts us into a model Renoir Garden home. On the next block are the Monets; then, the Van Goghs. The disconnect between the French Impressionists and stucco, vaguely Tuscan homes set in Nevada seems to elude most visitors, perhaps because less than 10 miles away sit miniature versions of Paris, Manhattan and Venice. Still, Monet would miss his lily ponds: They're illegal here.
We're accompanying two water cops, aka Southern Nevada Water Authority conservation program officers. Toby Bickmore and Hillery Francis inspect the homes to ensure they meet the criteria for the Water Smart label and Water Authority codes. They check for plumbing leaks, measure faucet flow, and even time how long it takes to produce hot water – each extra second or minute contributes to waste. And swamp coolers, though they use less energy than air conditioners, are forbidden because they use too much water.
But, interestingly enough, indoor water waste isn't that frowned upon. Every drop that goes back into the sewer system is treated, and much of it – 200,000 acre-feet per year – is released into the Las Vegas Wash, which empties into Lake Mead. There, by 1964 Supreme Court decree, it is credited against Nevada's Colorado River allotment, allowing the state to pull 439,000 acre-feet out of the river in 2012, far more than its share. The arrangement drives efficiency hardliners like Jeffrey Roberts, a lead architect of the Desert Living Center, nuts: The same water-recycling system he built into the Center is not allowed elsewhere in the city, because it would take precious water away from the wash. Once a mostly dry arroyo, it has been transformed into a green-robed stream that sparkles even in 118 degree July heat and sustains dozens of species. It's the closest Vegas will ever get to recreating the Garden of Eden.
"For us, outdoor use is most critical," says Bickmore, who resembles actor Peter Sarsgaard in a blue water-guy uniform. While we generally regard The Strip's giant resorts as Vegas' biggest water hogs, they actually account for just 7 percent of the urban area's use. Single-family residences, meanwhile, consume about 40 percent, and 70 percent of that is used outside, primarily to water grass. Replace just one square foot of turf with desert-friendly xeriscape, and you save 55 gallons per year, says Bickmore. That's why, in 2003, as drought tightened its grip, the Water Authority banned turf in the front yards of new homes and commercial buildings, and limited it to just half of backyards. Pools – which are no longer being installed because of the economy – count against that allowance.
The result is what I call the Vegas paradox. A 2010 survey found that new homes used an average of 115,000 gallons annually, while pre-2003 homes used 185,000 gallons. Altogether, the 120,000 homes built in the Las Vegas Valley since 2003 use about 8 billion gallons less per year than their predecessors. That means that, under current regulations, developers will have to keep building and building in order for the Water Authority to succeed in reducing per capita water-use to 199 gallons by 2035. The more the place grows, in other words, the more sustainable it appears.
The Water Authority currently offers homeowners $1.50 per square foot of grass torn out. As a result, 167.5 million square feet of grass have vanished, saving billions more gallons of water. Residents can't just put in gravel or concrete, though, because those contribute to the urban heat island effect. Instead, like Inspirada's Water Smart homes, yards need enough arid-friendly plants to shade at least half their area.
Still, plenty of Las Vegans cling to their grass. As we drive through the city, Davis and I traverse a verdant neighborhood near the old spring. I notice an early-'60s house that's so retro-cool I half expect to see Dean Martin stumble out grinning, martini in hand. The lawn is an eye-popping shade of green that looks less real than the artificial turf at newer homes, and most of the neighborhood's other homes are equally lush and boast tree-shaded pools. This means that each of them uses as much as 10 times the water that one of the Water Smart homes does. Davis winces at the sight of a sidewalk-spraying sprinkler system, but it occurs to me that this neighborhood has vast potential. If times get really dry, the Water Authority will have the water used here essentially in reserve and as a last resort could force even these residents to tear out their lawns.
Meanwhile, the Water Authority labors to remind these folks that they live in a desert, aggressively encouraging compliance with watering restrictions. In one series of ads, a man runs sprinklers indiscriminately, until a nun, old woman or cute little dog arrives at his door, glares at him, and eventually takes action: The old woman kicks him in the crotch, the nun whacks him with her nunchuck ruler, or the dog attacks. Davis says the ads have offended some, but are effective.
This education-over-regulation approach has drawn criticism, especially when it comes to water rates. Though Vegas' water-pricing structure is far stronger than it was in the '90s – a heavy water user pays about five times more than a water miser – rates are still far lower than in many other arid Western cities, such as Santa Fe and Tucson.
But Vegas' libertarian streak and strong labor movement mean heavy regulation isn't always politically feasible, says city sustainability director Perrigo. That's why the city government leads by example – switching out 40,000 streetlights with LEDs or installing solar arrays to save some $5 million on its yearly electric bill – or pushes voluntary efforts, like Green Chips, a public-private partnership that, among other things, created a sustainable leadership academy that fosters a greener organizational culture. In many cases, that's enough. "For the private side, it's a bottom-line thing," says Perrigo. "That's our big story." KB Homes, for example, deliberately chose to build 9,500 Water Smart homes.
Customers appreciate this, says Robison: "Look around us. We live in a desert." While KB officials won't discuss sales, they say that Water Smart homes cost the same as others (a 2,300-square-foot Renoir goes for around $230,000), and can save homeowners $350 in annual utility costs. KB embraces efficiency as a competitive advantage in a merciless market. Over on the Strip, the same thing is happening, with mega-resorts that once competed to be the most ostentatious now battling to be the most sustainable. Energy-efficient rooms may not matter to most customers, but the resorts are eager for conference and meeting bookings from corporate clients who relish blowing their own green-company horns. And then there are the greenbacks saved. "The accountants running spreadsheets on this stuff look at it and go, 'Holy crap, look at how much money we can save by doing a water recycling system,' " says Roberts, the architect.
When the Palazzo hotel, part of the Sands Resort, was completed in 2007, it was the biggest building in the U.S. – some 400,000 square feet larger than the Pentagon. The U.S. Green Building Council awarded the building a LEED Silver rating for its efficiency. Building green made sense, says Katarina Tesarova, Las Vegas Sands Corp. sustainability director, because Sands both developed and occupies the resort, and can thus realize efficiency payoffs over time. Generous incentives helped: A 2005 state law – later rewritten – gave developers as much as $3 in tax breaks for every $1 spent on green buildings, netting the Palazzo and the LEED-heavy City Center hundreds of millions in tax credits.
Tesarova, a lithe woman with giant brown eyes and a Russian accent, begins a tour of the building's green features deep in the four-level parking pit, where she points to a trio of tanks behind a chain-link fence. "It's not so sexy," she says, but it's important. The system takes nuisance groundwater ("I hate the term," she adds; "for me, no water is nuisance") that would have to be pumped out of the garage anyway, and treats it until it's suitable for irrigating, taking the hotel's landscaping "off the potable water grid." Down the street, the notorious Bellagio fountains operate on a similar system, making them a weird hybrid of excess and sustainability. Untreated nuisance water is used for the Palazzo's huge cooling towers, which keep the building inhabitable in summer – saving more than 46 million gallons annually. Pools are heated, meanwhile, with one of the biggest rooftop solar thermal arrays in the country.
Also in the not-sexy-but-important category is the waste-sorting center, located in the "back of the house," a sort of underground city with an army of workers – 8,000 for the whole resort – walking and driving forklifts down wide hallways, disappearing into and emerging from doorways that lead to restaurants or shops. In one cavernous room, people in blue jumpsuits sort through 50 tons of waste per day. Food waste uncontaminated with other garbage is sent to hog farms as feed; the rest is composted. The resort's recycling rate is about 60 percent, says Tesarova, meaning more than 10,000 tons of waste are diverted from the landfill per year. Fifty stories above the underground city, opulent rooms are outfitted with super-efficient LED architectural lights, low-flow plumbing fixtures and occupancy sensors that let the climate control know when to crank up.
And therein lies that old Vegas paradox again: No matter how great the LEED rating, the sheer scale of the operation renders any notion of sustainability somewhat absurd. Yet that same scale gives small actions, like switching out a lightbulb, a big impact. Exchange 50,000 lightbulbs for more efficient ones, and it makes a difference. Spread that across the MGM Grand and Caesars, the other mega-resorts with ambitious sustainability initiatives, and you have efficiency, super-sized.
Perhaps nothing embodies this paradox more dramatically than City Hall. The seven-story glass facade looms over downtown like a giant mirror, reflecting both a cloud-dappled sky and the 77-kilowatt forest of solar "trees" out front. The airy, hushed lobby resembles that of a Manhattan bank, complete with a metal sculpture that looks like blocks of blue ice embedded in the wall. Finished last year for about $146 million, the structure is LEED Gold certified and has yet more solar panels on the roof. Perrigo, who has an office on the top floor, says it's twice the size of the old City Hall but uses half the energy.
That's the catch. In order to move into a more efficient building, the city abandoned its previous headquarters, which, at just 40 years old, was hardly antiquated. According to a National Trust for Historic Preservation study, building from scratch can incur a big "carbon debt" that can take 40 years to repay with efficiency gains (and presumably a lot longer for a megalith like the Palazzo). "We've found that you can retrofit a building and achieve similar levels of efficiency as with a new build," says efficiency think tank Rocky Mountain Institute associate Michael Bendewald. And yet the bigger-and-newer-is-better ethos often prevails, whether it's with public buildings or Inspirada's efficient new homes. Only by consuming more, the twisted logic goes, can we consume less.
But in this and so many other ways, Vegas is just America, only more so. We have the world's most insatiable appetite, devouring twice as much water and energy per capita than even economic powerhouses like Germany. We have long hooked "sustainability" to consumption, perpetuating the very system at the root of our environmental ills even as we seek to lessen its impact. We'd rather build giant new solar installations in the desert than re-insulate our 20-year-old houses.
In this respect, Vegas, and for that matter every other Southwestern city, is at a crossroads. It can't really control its future growth. But as it crawls out of the housing bust, it can decide, through land-use zoning, urban planning and water-hookup restrictions, how future growth will happen. Will developers continue to gobble up more land on the urban fringes, build more highways and put more cars on them to get to those efficient new homes? Or will they repurpose what is already there, occupy the boarded-up buildings downtown, fill in empty lots with efficient high-rises and urban gardens, xeriscape emerald-green neighborhoods and do away with the need for cars?
Downtown Vegas might hold an answer. After visiting Perrigo at City Hall, I stroll around the area, which, after decades of decline, is being revitalized. I check out the bike lanes, painted Christmas-tree green for visibility, and look on as a sleek natural gas-powered bus glides past workers assembling the world's first shipping-container mall. And then I tour the new headquarters of the online retailer Zappos. The company moved from the Bay Area to suburban Henderson in 2004. When it outgrew those digs, it considered building a mega-corporate campus out on the city's edge. Instead, Zappos took over one of the empty buildings downtown, gutted it and refurbished it as an efficient, hipster-corporate HQ for 1,450 employees. The building? Las Vegas' former City Hall.
Jonathan Thompson is an HCN senior editor based in Durango, Colorado.]]>
In early May, Lake Mead hit a record low — 1,078 feet. Drought in the Colorado River Basin has reduced the reservoir to 140 feet below what it was 15 years ago. A third intake, scheduled to go online this summer, will reach even deeper into the shrinking supply. Water cutbacks won't start unless Mead is lower than 1,075 feet in January, though, and the Bureau of Reclamation predicts that lake depth could rise or even drop further by then, depending on precipitation and water releases from upstream Lake Powell.