Hydrologist: Monitoring of rural water needed

Thursday, June 3, 2004 | 10:03 a.m.

Although Southern Nevada could put extra water to use for growing Las Vegas, it is a social decision on how to share the scarce desert resource of groundwater within the state, a scientist said Tuesday night.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has requested the state grant groundwater rights from rural desert valleys north and east of Las Vegas.

The state engineer, Hugh Ricci, will attempt to balance available water with beneficial uses and other resources such as wetlands and wildlife, hydrologist Tom Myers said. People living in suburbs can be considered a beneficial use.

"Our state engineer is a very conservative person," Myers told a group of about 40 people at Christ Church Episcopal. "That is a very good thing."

For example, four years ago Ricci denied the Energy Department a permit for water to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain because the engineer did not consider dumping radioactive waste a benefit to Nevada, Myers said.

However, the mountain ranges and valley basins of eastern Nevada have not been monitored over a significant enough period of time to find out what happens to the groundwater, Myers said.

"I'm not saying we shouldn't take water from eastern Nevada," he said of the water authority's plan to acquire unallocated groundwater, "but there is no way that there is no effect."

Nature, through rainfall and snowpacks and deep springs, replenishes available groundwater each year, he said. But there is a limit.

"Ultimately, society must decide how big we want to be," Myers said of the booming Las Vegas Valley population.

Nevada and Las Vegas aren't the only places struggling to stretch their water supplies. And conservation is helping to spread the water around.

In addition to conservation, Myers suggested that Southern Nevada should pursue marketing and transferring water rights on the Colorado River, the source of 90 percent of the Las Vegas Valley's water supply.

The current law ruling the river allows Nevada to tap 300,000 acre-feet a year from the Colorado and some surplus if the state treats and returns the water to the river.

Myers, who is consulting for nonprofit groups such as the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN), which sponsored the workshop along with the Sierra Club and Friends of the Wilderness and other environmental groups, said that water officials need to pump groundwater in untested valleys around the state.

"It is not a question if the impact will occur," he said of possible threats to wildlife and wetlands, "but when and how much?"

That was a major question Indian Springs resident Terrie Houpt asked during the workshop.

During the past 30 years, Houpt said she watched a well on her property about 40 miles northwest of Las Vegas drop 20 feet.

"I don't have an idea of why it has dropped," she said after the hearing.

Houpt also said she is concerned about Southern Nevada's plans to pump water hundreds of miles away from the Las Vegas Valley, because natural hot springs in Indian Springs and north of Glendale, about 45 miles northeast of Las Vegas, could be affected.

Myers said that was an example of why water officials need to pump groundwater from rural areas in order to observe any stresses on the environment.

"A groundwater aquifer is similar to a full tub of water with the spigot on, but when Las Vegas starts pumping nearly as much water as nature puts in the ground, the springs will slowly dry and the people and environment of rural Nevada will suffer," Myers said.

"Importing groundwater is risky for Las Vegans, too," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert. "If we start relying on imported water and it becomes unavailable, we could be left high and dry.

"It's appropriate that we're holding this water workshop in a church, since in the arid West, all water is 'holy water,' " Johnson said.

Myers plans to present similar workshops in Reno on June 14 and in Ely later this summer.