Research notes #4: Plans, pipes and today
A water past and a water future.
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In 1971, the state of Nevada released a planning report focused on the future of water in the Las Vegas Valley. More specifically, future supply. The report — available in full and in summary on the Nevada Division of Water Resources website — is fascinating.
What stood out going through it recently was its breadth. Some ideas were realistic. Others were outlandish and implausible, even for a half century ago.
The report examines everything from piping groundwater from the Amargosa Desert and Pahranagat Valley to restricting population growth and collaborating with other states to import water hundreds of miles from the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Most of these schemes, especially the more audacious ones, have not come to pass.
The Las Vegas Valley’s population in 2020 was more than double what the report had predicted, even as its sources of water are mostly the same. Las Vegas did this (and is continuing to do this) by incentivizing conservation, regulating water-intensive grass, educating its residents, and restructuring rates to reduce per capita water use. Water officials had looked for three decades at importing groundwater from rural basins in northern Nevada, but they shelved a costly pipeline plan in 2020 amid legal challenges.
The future of water supply for Southern Nevada turned out to be in conservation.
And conservation is one of the ideas presented in the 1971 report. In fact, the report’s first recommendation, in the summary section, was “to achieve a pattern of voluntary reduction in use so that the need to import water before 2020 would be obviated.”
The report is also sprinkled with the seeds of a few other ideas Las Vegas has since adopted. It suggests looking to the Virgin River, a Lake Mead tributary, to boost the water portfolio. And it analyzes exchanging Colorado River with Southern California for investments in desalination. Today exchanges are being considered for recycling.
But I’ll admit it. The report caught my eye for all that was considered and ultimately not built. Southern Nevada may have invested in conservation and reducing its (high) per capita use rate in 1971. Yet the report spends pages looking at another course.
Increasing water supply through importation, schemes that can read as improbable if you are familiar with the places, the politics, the engineering and the costs involved.
This section is split in two: There are intrastate plans and interstate plots.
In the intrastate import plans, you see early origins of the Las Vegas pipeline, which would not be formally proposed for another 18 years. The report goes into depth and detail about engineering conveyances. The Amargosa part includes sentences like this:
“When considering Amargosa as a source of supply, consideration has been given to its proximity to the Nevada Test Site [where underground nuclear testing was taking place]… Since aqueduct facilities are normally designed for a minimum of 0.100g ground accelerations due to naturally occurring to seismic activity, the dynamic effects of the atomic testing should have no affect on aqueduct facilities.”
And under description of aqueduct facilities:
“The aqueduct from Amargosa Desert would have a total length or 131 miles of which 88 miles would be trapezoidal open channel and 43 miles would be pipeline.”
And under non-economic considerations:
“From the note of immediacy in current literature it is possible that the pupfish will be destroyed by the falling water table or satisfactorily transferred to safety elsewhere prior to the inauguration of the proposed water exportation project.”
The pupfish, it should be noted, has not gone extinct. Far from it.
In the interstate plans, you can see the regional pipe dreams planners and politicians looked to in the future, with the goal of moving water from wetter to drier regions.
One water project included in the 1971 report and proposed by the L.A. Department of Water and Power sought to move the Snake River roughly 520 miles to Lake Mead. Another sought to move about two times the volume of the Colorado River annually from the lower Columbia River to Lake Mead. A third plan looked to move part of the lower Snake River and Columbia River to Lake Mead through a 1,016-mile aqueduct.
The plans drive a sharp contrast with demand management and many augmentation strategies that are being pursued today, which recognize the need to use less amid a changing climate and after an era of issuing more rights to use water than there was water to go around. But the ideas have not totally faded — not by any measure.
Former President Donald Trump recently referred to a “large faucet” in the Columbia River that could be a solution for California’s water strains, to which a professor at the University of Calgary had this to about moving water from the binational watershed:
"To me, it's an uninformed opinion. It's somebody that doesn't fully understand how water works and doesn't understand the intricacies of allocating water not only between two countries but also for the environment," Stadnyk said.
Most people and most politicians are more subtle about how they go about suggesting this. After all, moving water from one place means taking it away from another place.
In basins like the Mississippi River or Great Lakes, proposals by Southwest states to divert water have been met with resistance and resounding NOs from residents and officials. For more, it’s worth checking out this KUNC piece on the barriers to such plans. They often come down to 1) politics/governance, 2) money and 3) engineering.
Trump might not know much about water in the West (as evidenced by this distorted and ahistorical Tulare Lake exchange with Joe Rogen), but I don’t think he is as alone in seeing options in a large-scale regional diversion plan as many believe, or want to believe. Building large-scale water infrastructure captures the imagination in a way that other (more invisible) solutions to augment and expand water portfolios do not.
A national pipeline was discussed in the New York Times recently as an outcome of not getting a better handle on groundwater depletion. In 2021, Arizona urged Congress to investigate whether to bring flood water from the Mississippi River to the Colorado. I hear about it in interviews more and more, and frankly, in casual conversations too.
And consider the quote the KUNC story ended on:
“It'll be the time someday, if we want the Southwest to continue to grow the way it's been growing,” he said. “There's only so much water in the basin.”
These ideas seem to come and go. When they come, they get the headlines. When they go, they fade into old reports. Somewhere in between, there is a much more nuanced and ongoing conversation that seems to be going on. Is the future in getting more or using less? A balance? If it is about “augmenting” supply, what is the best way to do that? Is it in importing and diverting water or focusing on managing local supplies?
The 1971 report is a reminder that these questions are not new.
What else I’m reading and watching:
Klamath River salmon upstream in Oregon after dam removal (L.A. Times)
A ruling that could have big Colorado River implications (InsideClimateNews)
Groups challenge Utah permit for Green River lithium project (Law360)
Mine approved despite possible harm to endangered wildflower (Guardian)
Something is rotten in SoCal’s Metropolitan Water District (L.A. Times)
Turlock Irrigation District is placing solar panels atop canals (Modesto Bee)
A California wetland program lifts hopes for shorebirds (Audubon Magazine)
California looks to streamline desalination plants (E&E News)
Nevada precipitation in 2024 was normal. What about 2025? (Nevada Independent)
Lack of water quality data is a form of environmental injustice (Eos)
That’s all for now. Until next time,
Daniel