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\tThe Bellagio Fountains gush 460 feet (140.2 meters) high every 15 minutes nightly. Golf courses carpet the desert, as they have since Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack played Las Vegas. And the casino restaurants still serve water without asking.<\/p>\n
\tThe 2 million residents and 43 million visitors a year in the Las Vegas area might never know that their principal water supply, Lake Mead on the Colorado River, is almost the lowest since Hoover Dam created it in 1936. Engineers are boring through rock in an $817 million race to lower the city\u2019s water intake to keep up with the sinking lake level.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cJust because you have one good year of water every eight years doesn\u2019t change the long-term trajectory of the river, which is distinctly downward,\u201d said Rob Mrowka, a senior scientist in Las Vegas with the Center for Biological Diversity. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a crisis at hand and a catastrophe in the making.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tIf the severe drought gripping the American West continues, Las Vegas may find itself on the losing end of an increasingly intense battle to obtain water. While conspicuous consumption in a desert playground may work in times of plenty, Las Vegas and its thirsty suburbs will need to adapt to changing conditions, Mrowka said.<\/p>\n
\tRegionally isolated from abundant water sources, Las Vegas hasn\u2019t done enough to ensure a steady supply, failing to anticipate what may become a long-term shortage, said Bart Miller, water program director for the conservation nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, based in Boulder, Colorado. The metro area needs to wean itself from historic dependence on a small share of the Colorado River, Miller said.<\/p>\n
\t\u2018World of Hurt\u2019<\/p>\n
\t\u201cLas Vegas, because they\u2019re a very dry place and limited to this allocation from the Colorado River, needs to accelerate their efforts to be as water-efficient as they can be,\u201d Miller said. \u201cIf we don\u2019t take action, we\u2019ll be in a world of hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tIn Nevada, the driest state in the nation, master-planned communities with fountains now ring artificial lakes formed with water diverted from that river, even though the state is entitled under compacts and court rulings to just 2 percent of its water.<\/p>\n
\tMrowka was environmental manager for Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, in 2003 when it adopted conservation measures including a prohibition on new lawns. He said the region hasn\u2019t done enough to limit water consumption indoors, to end profligate uses such as man-made lakes and fountains, and to explore supplies other than the Colorado River and a proposed pipeline, currently challenged in court, to divert rural groundwater from eastern Nevada.<\/p>\n
\tShort Attention<\/p>\n
\t\u201cPeople have a very short attention span,\u201d Mrowka said. \u201cWe\u2019re not doing nearly enough that needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe neon-lit casinos of the famed Las Vegas Strip have demonstrated some awareness of the water shortage. The 22 million gallons of water in the eight-acre lake supplying the Bellagio\u2019s fountains is recycled. Las Vegas-based owner MGM Resorts International is also saving water through automated irrigation systems, high-efficiency dishwashers and linen reuse, spokeswoman Rachel Rogala said.<\/p>\n
\tWater use per person fell 40 percent between 2002 and 2013, according to data from the the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the water agency that serves the Las Vegas metropolitan area.<\/p>\n
\tThe conservation measures allow Las Vegas, with 150,000 hotel and motel rooms to fill, to keep up business as usual. Sin City is the economic hub of Clark County, which is home to almost three-fourths of Nevada\u2019s population and the center of the state\u2019s largest industry, leisure and hospitality. The county calculated tourism\u2019s impact at $45.2 billion last year, including $9.7 billion spent on gambling.<\/p>\n
\tWest\u2019s Largest<\/p>\n
\tNevada\u2019s primary source of water, the Colorado, draws from as far north as Wyoming. Runoff from the Rocky Mountains and other ranges, flowing into the largest river in the West, is apportioned among the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Nevada gets the smallest share, about 2 percent. California gets the most, about 27 percent.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt has a lot to do not with what happens in Vegas, but what happens in California, Arizona and even Mexico,\u201d where the river ends, said Douglas Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. \u201cThe stability of their water supply depends on the overall seven-state management of the river.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe allocations were set through a series of agreements and court cases dating to the 1920s and reflecting population and water use patterns at the time.<\/p>\n
\tPopulation Boom<\/p>\n
\tNevada\u2019s population was about 77,000 in 1920; today it\u2019s about 2.8 million, according to Census Bureau data. Nevertheless, \u201cthe parties aren\u2019t going to reallocate the river,\u201d Kenney said.<\/p>\n
\tLake Mead is at about 45 percent of capacity. Its surface elevation as of April 11 was 1,099.24 feet above sea level and is projected to drop to 1,082 feet by the end of the year, according to U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Rose Davis.<\/p>\n
\tThe falling level is drawing closer to Las Vegas\u2019s water intakes. One will become inoperable at 1,050 feet, the other at 1,000 feet. In September, Ronald Zegers, assistant general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said the lake could fall low enough to render one intake pipe inoperable by the spring of 2015.<\/p>\n
\tSince 2008, contractors have been boring through rock to create a third conduit that would draw water from as low as 860 feet above sea level, said Nicole Lise, a spokeswoman for the authority.<\/p>\n
\tAs of September, Zegers said in a report to the board, the new pipeline was almost a year behind schedule.<\/p>\n
Posted by:<\/strong> Skinny on April 15, 2014, 2:56 am<\/p>\n \tUnfortunately either he did not bother to research his facts or he decided to deliberately lie to his readers by falsifying the facts.<\/p>\n \tThe Bellagio uses water from a private well beneath the property \u2014 the water source for the old Dunes golf course \u2014 and thus does not further strain the Colorado River, the primary source of water for the Las Vegas Valley. The fountains actually use less water than irrigating the golf course did. So the water being used by Bellagio has nothing to do with Lake Mead or the Colorado River which is what the reporter of this article is implying.<\/p>\n \tMost golf courses use greywater to irrigate their courses. Greywater or sullage is defined as wastewater generated from wash hand basins, showers and baths, which can be recycled on-site for uses such as WC flushing, landscape irrigation and constructed wetlands. Greywater often includes discharge from laundry, dishwashers and kitchen sinks.<\/p>\n \tOnce again, this has nothing to do with Lake Mead or the Colorado River.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Bellagio Fountains gush 460 feet (140.2 meters) high every 15 minutes nightly. Golf courses carpet the desert, as they have since Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack played Las Vegas. And the casino restaurants still serve water without asking….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-casino-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}This reporter starts off by blasting Bellagio for the use of water in their fountains and the area golf courses which use water to keep the fairways and greens lush and beautiful. He does admit way down towards the end of the article that the water in the lake at Bellagio is recycled water. But he leaves the reader with the impression that Bellagio and golf courses are using water from the Lake Mead which is at about 45% of its capacity.<\/p>\n