I will set you straight!
Posted on 07/30/2022 3:40:08 PM PDT by bgill
Lake Las Vegas is currently not getting filled with additional water after an intake pipe at Lake Mead can no longer draw water... Water needs to be supplied to Lake Las Vegas due to evaporation. The city reports delivering 1.3 billion gallons of water to the lake from July 2020 to June 2021. The city reports an increase to 1.5 billion within the past year because additional water was put in to compensate for Basic Water Co.’s ceasing operations.
Lake Las Vegas is about a 30-minute drive from the Las Vegas strip. There are hotels there including Hilton Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa and The Westin Lake Las Vegas Resort & Spa, along with a golf course, restaurants, businesses, and water sports. There are also luxury homes. Currently, development continues.
The Lake Las Vegas area also has a significant amount of grass.
(Excerpt) Read more at 8newsnow.com ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HObFRE_WWU
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Why am I thinking Mexico is getting our Lake Mead water?
I watched this a couple days ago and it seems to be great information as to one reason why Lake Mead water is disappearing. Good post!
When you build cities for millions of people in a desert hundreds of miles inland what do you expect will happen? This is not Global Warming. This is the natural climate and the reason there was a desert there to begin with.
Like Las Vegas itself, another desert oasis with absolutely no reason for existing.
Lake Mead and the Dam were designed for the time it was built. If the population had stayed the constant it would have been fine. None of the water projects built over 85 years ago were meant for the demands on them of today and that is reason for the water problems and they can’t be solved easily. California could have done the smart thing by building at least 2 Desalination plants that would have gone a long way to solving the problem , but they didn’t. They spent $12 Billion on a plant to convert waste water to drinking water, who really wants to drink that?
And demand East Coast greenery & yards!
“You live in an effing desert!” - Sam Kinison
I was just in Phoenix, which now has over 4 million in their metro area, and I’m thinking, how the heck do they get enough water to support that?
It’s my understanding the US has a treaty with Mexico to allow a certain amount of Colorado River water to flow to Mexico.
I have no idea how much.
We looked at having a second home there but in the end just seemed so incongruous....as if it was supposed to be an Italian town on a lake...but in reality as phony as so much of Las Vegas.
I pretty much think the desert is a great place to live if you’re a reptile.
The Highland Lakes were constructed in the 1940s and 1950s, with a series of dams along the Colorado River (a different Colorado River than the one that supplies Lake Mead). At the time, they were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, rural Burnet and Llano Counties with very little population. Now, there are a whole lot more people drawing water from the lakes.
The climate here has always consisted of a series of droughts separated by floods. We are currently in the drought part of the cycle.
Phoenix, Tucson, and much of the rest of Arizona are mining water, i.e. pumping groundwater faster than it recharges. Due to ground settling, the basins aren’t going to recharge fully, either (can’t float rocks, even very small ones). I hope there’s enough water to last my lifetime; after that I don’t much care.
There is a drought of common sense.
I know this because I had the great fortune to perform monthly bird surveys there for many many years. It’s a spectacular place absolutely loaded with birds. A true oasis for both migrant and resident birds.
I’ve since moved, and I often miss my old job and those early morning surveys. But time marches on…
Good grief! Lake mead annual evaporation loss measured at 0.6 maf (million acre feet) of water or...
1 acre-foot = 360,000 gollons
0.6 maf = 600,000 x 360,000 = 216 billion gallons annually evaporate as loos from Lake Mead alone.
So using the simpleton logic of targeted aggression against a lake built by a developer to service a wealthy development is a waste of water @ 1.5 billion gallon annual allocation compared to an annual evaporation waste of 216 billion gallons from Lake Mead annually by just storing the water behind a dam.
Yeah, right... Lake Mead is disappearing because of a housing development in Las Vegas using 1.5 billion gallons a year
Put that in perspective with the actual Lake Mead Budget:
Approximate annual inflow into Lake Mead
(8.23 maf release from Lake Powell plus average intervening flows between Lake Powell and Lake Mead)
9.0 maf = 3.24 trillion gallons
Approximate annual outflow from Lake Mead
(Lower Basin apportionment’s to States and Mexico Treaty allocation plus downstream regulation including side inflows, evapo-transpiration, transmission losses, etc.)
-9.6 maf 3.456 trillion gallons
Approximate annual Lake Mead evaporation loss
-0.6 maf = 216 billion gallons annually
Water balance
-1.2 maf = 432 billion gallons annually
That means the development accounts for 0.0434 % of the lakes outgoing budget.
Pretty lame thought process and naive understanding of Lake Mead water allocation and loss.
Households(pools, watering, leaks, poor maintenance, irresponsible use, non compliance to restrictions by HOA’s and LVVW) along with individual self-awareness, indifference, or non-conservation attitudes contribute to most of the ‘wasted’ water in the Las Vegas valley. Not a recreation POND in a wealthy neighborhood.
https://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/water-budget.htm
I will set you straight!
Central Texas has to send their water to the rice farmers in south Texas because the climate there doesn’t support rice growing.
During the drought of 2011, when towns were out of water and were bringing it in by train and hiring water witchers, the rice was deemed more important.
Also, Las Vegas runoff and waste water is diverted UNDER Lake Las Vegas into Lake Mead.
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