U.S. Water News Online
LAS VEGAS -- The booming Las Vegas area's water demands could outstrip the region's share of the Colorado River by 2007, according to the 2006 water budget approved by the Southern Nevada Water Authority board.
Kay Brothers, the Water Authority's deputy general manager, called that timeline a worst-case scenario, adding that through conservation and careful planning the state's share of the river water could be stretched beyond 2007.
But Brothers acknowledged the day is coming when southern Nevada will no longer be able to depend largely on its allotment from the river which currently supplies 90 percent of the area's drinking water.
Brothers also said the annual budgets are based on separate projections from each of the authority's member agencies -- projections that "tend to be conservative."
The water authority has had to come up with back-up resources, just in case.
The 2006 water resource plan approved along with the agency's budget outlines some of those options. They include about 290,000 acre feet of groundwater stored beneath the Las Vegas Valley, 30,000 acre feet banked with California and an agreement with Arizona that guarantees Nevada 1.25 million acre feet of water over the next 30 years.
The water authority already has plans to build a $2 billion pipeline to pump groundwater from rural basins in rural Nevada. Officials also hope to use water from the Virgin and Muddy rivers.
The first of the rural groundwater is slated to arrive in 2008 from watersheds near Indian Springs.
Nevada gets 300,000 acre feet of water that flows into Lake Mead from the Colorado River each year, though that amount is stretched to about 460,000 acre feet through return-flow credits the state receives for returning its treated wastewater to Lake Mead.
A 1922 compact and several later agreements divided the river among seven Western states. Efforts to change the deal have triggered bitter fights in the nation's highest courts.
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