Lake Mead Is Drying Up
- Posted by: Mark Frauenfelder
- on May 6, 2009 at 9:30 am
Water levels are falling in America’s largest reservoir. If it dries up, so could power and water for much of the Southwest.
Imagine Nevada’s Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, as a great sand pit, and imagine the population of the western United States as a colossal ostrich burying its head in the pit. And now, imagine the sand level dropping so fast that the willfully ignorant bird is forced to confront the fact that Lake Mead may actually become as dry as a sand pit in a decade.
Lake Mead stores water from the Colorado River. When full, it holds 9.3 trillion gallons, an amount equal to the water that flows through the Colorado River in two years. The water from Lake Mead is used for many things. It irrigates a million acres of crops in the United States and Mexico, and supplies water to tens of millions of people. Its mighty Hoover Dam generates enough electricity to power a half-million homes. Additionally, the power from Hoover Dam is used to carry water up and across the Sierra Nevada Mountains on its way to Southern California.
In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high. It’s been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was enjoying one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years. Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the last 75 years, we’ve been partying like it’s 1929. Farmers grow rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead; residents of desert communities maintain front lawns of green grass; golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.
The combination of a changing climate and a strong demand for the lake’s remaining water has resulted in 100 foot drop since 2000. While that’s just 10 percent under the lake’s high water mark in 1983, Lake Mead is like a martini glass—wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. That 10 percent dip represents a loss of half Lake Mead’s water supply in nine years, from 96 percent capacity to 43 percent.
Anyone who’s gone on a diet knows this simple equation: if you burn fewer calories than you eat, you’ll gain weight. But like a cheating dieter in Superman’s Bizarro world, the Western United States has been sucking more water out of Lake Mead than the dwindling Colorado River can provide to replace it. When output is greater than input, the reservoir shrinks.
And it continues to shrink. Lake Mead’s water level fell 14 feet last year, and the Bureau of Reclamation has projected the level will drop 14 more feet this summer. That will bring it perilously close to 1,075 feet, the point at which the federal government can step in and declare a drought condition, forcing a reduction of 400,000 acre-feet drawn from Lake Mead per year. A typical Las Vegas home uses a half acre-foot of water per year, so such a reduction would be equal to
turning the tap off for 800,000 households.
In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued a paper titled “When will Lake Mead go dry?” which set the odds of Lake Mead drying up by 2021 at 50-50. No more water, no more electricity, no more pumping power.
“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system,” concluded the paper’s authors. “The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region.”
Conservation efforts are helping (Southern Nevada has significantly reduced its draw from 325,000 acre-feet a year in 2000 to 265,000 acre-feet today) but the Colorado River remains “oversubscribed.” Millions of acre-feet are sent to California, Nevada, and Mexico annually, draining Lake Mead and neighboring Lake Powell faster than they can be replenished. Conservation solutions include “grass buyback” programs to encourage people to install drought-tolerant landscaping, tax incentives for pool-covers, and inevitable rate hikes.
Frustratingly, Las Vegas residents tried to pass a bill that would allow homeowners to install graywater systems but the Southern Nevada Water Authority blocked it, offering up a piece of fuzzy math as a defense. Las Vegas Valley is alloted 300,000 acre-feet of water per year from the reservoir. The water that goes down drainpipes in Las Vegas gets pumped 12 miles back to a reclamation plant near Lake Mead. This returned water counts as a credit toward getting more fresh water from the lake. The Water Authority says if people start using graywater to water their lawns and gardens rather than using drinking-quality water, their lowered water bills will dissuade them from conserving water. In other words, the Water Authority believes that legalizing graywater will cause people to use more fresh water and return less dirty water to the reclamation plant.
One of the more radical proposals involves pumping water from the eastern United States (where many regions are suffering the consequences of flooded rivers) over the Rockies to the West. In a Las Vegas Sun interview on May 1, Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said, “We’ve taken water from the West now for a hundred years, maybe it’s time to start taking water from the East, rather than from the West.” Another speculative proposal lies beyond the shores of California, where there’s an ocean of water available for desalinization. In April, the California Coastal Commission approved the West Basin Municipal Water District’s plan to build a desalination system in Redondo Beach that can desalt 100,000 gallons of seawater per day.
The power requirement for either proposal—desalting seawater or transporting water over great distance—is enormous. But if the only other alternative is a mass evacuation from the western United States, what other choice do we have?
Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine and the founder of Boing Boing. He is currently writing a book on the do-it-yourself movement for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin.
Top photo by flickr user (cc) TimPearce. Bottom photo by flickr user (cc) jscatty.
DISCUSSION: 678 Comments
Makes me feel a lil bit better about my current life situation!…Thank you Mother Earth
Shit this is horrible. I think the price of water needs to go waaay up in order to figure in the ecological costs of its use, and also we need to really all try to use less. Desalination scares me a lot too. What happens when we pump millions of gallons of water out of the ocean? I don’t think it’s gonna be good in the long run although short term it seems like it could provide a solution. I think the human population needs to reach a new level of awareness or we are all DOOMED! Hey, I’m just being real.
How about people don’t build unsustainable cities in the middle of the freaking desert? The self-entitlement of Americans never ceases to amaze me.
Don’t even think about tapping the Great Lakes Basin. As the late comic Sam Kinison said, “YOU LIVE IN A DESERT”.Cut out the ostentatious wastefulness before thinking about encroaching over the Rockies.
You are not going to suck up the Great Lakes, thank you very much. People out west – the Great Lakes states have plenty of water and cheap housing!
Gee, I don’t suppose there are any golf courses in the south west, so that certainly couldn’t be a factor.
To answer the concluding question: how about we go with the mass evacuation? Because that’s what has always happened there.The question is not “What if the water runs out?” it’s “What are the implications of the water running out?” Barring a miracle, we’re not going to be able to pump the Great Lakes over to Colorado in the next 15 years, nor can we afford desalinization. Maybe it’s time to start planning the exodus now, instead of waiting for it to happen to us.
The basic problem here is that hydroelectric generation is at cross purpose with a water reservoir. A water reservoir saves water and a hydroelectric dam pours water through it. You can only do both with the same dam if you have a lot of water reliably flowing into the system. The solution is to pick one function over the other. Since its easy to get power than water, the best long term solution would be to build 3 or 4 gigawatt nuclear plants on the shores of lack Mead and then shutdown the water flowing through the dam’s power plant. Oh, yeah and we could stop using water from the lake to grow rice in the freaking dessert.
greywater = your poop water = gross
The only thing that I can’t seem to understand from this article is, will the future generations (if there end up being any after say, around year 2100) think that we were all a bunch of arrogant bastards or just unbelievably stupid?
The other problem with water distribution from lake Mede and other water sources is that everyone pays a flat rate for the water and many people pay a subsidized rate (farmers growing rice in the desert). The easiest way to ration the use of water is let the market set the price of water. That way people who use water profligately pay through nose. Those who only use the water because it is subsidized would stop mindlessly consuming water. Everyone would pay attention to their water use with having to send guys around with night sticks to make sure people don’t use to much.
Blackwater= your poop water.Greywater = the drain from your shower and kitchen sink. Not so gross.
mass extinction
How about deporting the millions of illegal aliens living in the Western USA? Between washing clothes, bathing, cooking and drinking, etc, they use millions of gallons.
check out the Southern Nevada Water Authority talking about water conservation in Southern Nevada. This is from a cross country bicycle ride / environmental documentary series SOUTHERN TIER. http://www.vimeo.com/3877208
Interesting to note that the largest percentage of water usage goes towards agriculture:
“Agriculture is a major user of ground and surface water in the United States, accounting for 80 percent of the Nation’s consumptive water use and over 90 percent in many Western States”.
Source: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/WaterUse/
So even though they make no common sense, pointing the finger at easy targets like golf courses in the desert ignores the real culprit.
More information:
http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/water/a_wateruse.html
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/summary95.html
300,000 acre feet = 2% of the 15,000,000 acre feet that flow through the Colorado per yearNew Mexico and Wyoming, which aren’t even on the Colorado River, receive 6 and 7% respectively.Utah – 12%Arizona – 19%Colorado – 26%California – 29%http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/topics/water/
I hear real estate is Detroit is real cheap right now – they’ve got plenty of water.
“F” vegas and unsustainable flood-irrigatin’-retard farmers.
Why is there a need for golf and rice fields in the West. And I believe that placing nuclear power plants on the shore of a lake maintained for drinking purposes might prove to be potentially hazerdous.
<i> And I believe that placing nuclear power plants on the shore of a lake maintained for drinking purposes might prove to be potentially hazerdous.</i>75 years of experience would suggest otherwise. Nuclear power plants need water for cooling so most nuclear power plants are situated on bodies of water and most sit beside rivers or lakes used for drinking water by someone. Their are 5 decommissioned but still radioactive WWII reactors that have sat on the banks of the Columbia river in Washington for last 75 years without incident so I think that the experience of hundreds of plants throughout the free world operating for 75 years without incident constitutes a proven safety record for all reasonable people.Certainly the risk is acceptable compared to the alternative which is having a large area run out of either water or power or both. Electricity and water are not luxuries but necessities that keep people alive. Even if we evacuated Nevada we would just relocate the need for power and water to somewhere else. Once you throw the threat of global warming into the mix, then very minor risk poised by nuclear power is absolutely dwarfed by the harm of not having the.
One thing that I have always wondered about regarding desalinization is – what happens to the stuff that they take out of the water? All the salt/minerals have to be put someplace, no? My guess is that they just dump it back in the ocean, hoping that it’s big enough to swallow the waste from the desalinization process… that notion scares the crap out of me. We are not good at judging the environmental impact of ongoing processes like these…
You can drink your dust and eat your Toyotas, California and Nevada.You will not get a drop from the Great Lakes Basin. I would rather that you stay where you are and continue to water your lawns, golf courses, and rice fields. How funny!
Not all of California is sucking the southwest dry. Southern California is also sucking Northern California dry.
F taking water from the East – stop creating golf courses and rain forest-like yards in the desert.When will we stop ignoring reality? When the lights go out in Vegas?