12/06/2019 | 6m 20s | Video has closed captioning.
Nevada has a unique water history, which has shaped the development of Las Vegas and the rest of the state. Conservation and compromise continue to shape the future of Nevada.
Aired: 12/06/19
♪♪♪ "Water waste investigator 7158.
"Time is now 6:52 a.m., 23rd of July.
"I have spray and flow..." In a city maybe better known for its excess, we're serious about conservation, especially when it comes to water.
"It's not causing runoff, "but it's not efficient."
You might not know it flying over the opulent and lush Las Vegas Strip nor our sprawling, pool-lined suburbs.
(Bronson Mack) We have a limited, finite amount of water to supply to our community.
About 70% of our state's entire population is right here in the Las Vegas Valley, and with that we generate about 75% of our state's economic output, and we do all of that using only 5% of all of the water that's available within the state of Nevada.
It doesn't make sense: How is so much built on so little?
To get to the answers, we need to go back in history.
(John Entsminger) In 1922 the seven states that share the Colorado River divided up the waters of the river, and Nevada was left with 1.8% of the legal entitlements to the river.
(Michael Greene) 300,000 acre feet a year out of 7-1/2 million.
(Patricia Mulroy) We were the forgotten state.
I mean, the joke was always that the Nevada state engineer at the time was drunk under a table somewhere in Santa Fe and forgot to come to the negotiations, right?
And so at that time, 300,000 acre feet was considered to be an enormous amount of water.
-When Las Vegas started as a town in 1905, the attraction was the underground water supply that bubbled up at what's now the Springs Preserve, and we managed to destroy it in about half a century.
Nobody at the time anticipated that this area would end up with more than two million people.
-From the founding of Las Vegas until 1971, the Big Spring complexes that existed stopped flowing from the overpumping of groundwater so it was really necessary to access the Colorado River to reduce that overreliance upon groundwater.
Once the groundwater dwindled, Hoover Dam gave Las Vegas an abundance of Colorado River water being stored behind the dam in Lake Mead, but then history damn near repeated itself.
Fast forward to 1983, the second intake is put in in Lake Mead, and the Bureau of Reclamation declares at that point Southern Nevada has enough water until 2025.
Then the growth started becoming exponential and we were seeing years in which the amount of water we were using was increasing by 17%, and all of a sudden this water supply looked like it was going to evaporate in the '90s.
So things started getting tense in Southern Nevada.
"There is no water problem.
"There is a problem of attitude, "culture and history."
There was little, if any, communication between North Las Vegas, Henderson and what was deemed the 800-pound gorilla which was the Las Vegas Valley Water District.
So the first order of business was to create peace.
It allowed us to move ahead and create the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and it changed everything for Southern Nevada.
Everything.
What changed was everyone working together on sound policy and innovative solutions.
We recycle and reuse all of the water that we use indoors.
We treat that water to near-drinking-water standards and then we return it back to Lake Mead, and for every gallon of treated wastewater that is returned to Lake Mead, we can take another gallon out and bring it into the valley as potable drinking water.
That allows us to stretch our water resources.
Pragmatic leaders, sound policy and decision-making and new infrastructure put us on the right track just in time for a new historical challenge.
We had a 50-year resource plan that relied 100% on the Colorado River.
Well, by 2002 Lake Mead was starting to drop dramatically.
(Doug Bennett) The water levels just literally plunged.
I think we reached a level where it was down 130 feet.
That was what I consider to be a landmark year in terms of water conservation.
Conservation in Las Vegas became synonymous with community.
Putting in time-of-day watering restrictions and then annually having seasons where you watered three days a week, that really made a difference.
Paying people to take their grass out.
I mean, grass was coming out left and right in golf courses and residential areas.
-We utilize advanced metering technology to help monitor how much water is passing through individual customer meters and how much water is being used.
-We can sit here proudly today and say we're one of the most resilient communities on the river because we adapted early.
-Literally we got 1.8% of what was allocated on the Colorado, but I feel like having that very small apportionment was a major catalyst at trying to get the seven states together and collaborate.
-I think the Las Vegas lesson to the rest of the country, and frankly the rest of the world, is you can have robust economic growth and use less water but it's a matter of political will, it's a matter of the community being willing to make substantial investments in demand management to happen, and it's changing the culture.
Because it's not a Las Vegas or a Nevada or even a regional problem anymore.
As water demand continues to increase, the hope is that our water story becomes your water story.
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