Friday, June 18, 2004 | 11:26 a.m.
The dropping level of Lake Mead could require an investment of at least "several hundred million dollars" to keep water coming up the hill from the lake to Las Vegas, water officials said Thursday.
The cause is the drought plaguing the West and the Rocky Mountains, the worst, say scientists studying tree rings, in more than 500 years.
The drought threatens to effectively empty Lake Mead's upstream reservoir, Lake Powell, within a few years, at which point Lake Mead will begin to "drop like a stone," Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy has warned.
The lake is at 1,128 feet above sea level, down more than 85 feet from where it was four years ago. It now holds only 55 percent of its capacity.
All the news about the lake's level this week was bad: Deputy General Manager Kay Brothers told the water authority board that new projections show the lake level at 1,125 feet by Jan. 1, a level that would require the federal Bureau of Reclamation to cut off access to the so-called "surplus" of unclaimed water from the Upper Basin states for Nevada, California and Arizona.
It would also set further restrictions on water use, which could include reducing the number of watering days and levying larger fines for water waste.
Water rates could be raised, less productive uses of water could be banned, and a ban on driveway car washing could be reinstated as well.
But Mulroy and her staff have expected the cutoff. If the drought continues and demand continues at its present rate, the lake could fall below 1,050 feet, putting the older, upper "straw" that brings water to Las Vegas out of action. If the lake dropped below 1,000 feet, so would the $2 billion second straw.
Two things would prevent that scenario, Mulroy said from Salt Lake City, where she met Thursday afternoon with delegations from the other six states along the river and the federal government.
The states could collectively set an elevation to protect, slashing water deliveries to some users to keep the lake level in a balance. Or, the water authority could deepen the pumps for at least one of the delivery straws.
Or both scenarios could be needed.
Vince Alberta, a water authority spokesman, said only a very preliminary estimate of the cost of digging up the pumps for the water system has been done. Alberta and Mulroy said the outlook now would be to take the system all the way to the bottom of the ancient Colorado River channel, which disappeared when Hoover Dam was completed in 1936.
That channel is nearly 380 feet below the surface of the water, Alberta said.
"It is conceivable. It could be done," he said, based on the early looks at a possible project by the agency's engineers. "The construction costs alone would be several hundred million dollars."
The work would be more ambitious than a $6.4 million project started and completed this year that extended the upper intake, taking it about 70 feet deeper. Water officials said that project helped bring deeper, cleaner water into the system, but the water cannot flow into the intakes below the level of the pumps, which are at 1,050 and 1,000 feet.
Las Vegas and its surrounding suburbs have done well with conservation efforts, last year trimming about 15 percent off of 2002's water use rates. But Las Vegas' effort does not significantly affect the lake level.
Nevada has an annual take of 300,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Mead. Arizona has an annual allocation of 2.8 million and California has 4.4 million acre-feet.
All users on the Colorado River, including Mexico, have a legal allocation of 15.5 million acre-feet. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the inflow to the river this year is less than 8 million acre-feet.
"The result is that we are going to have to do more to deepen that intake," Mulroy said. "We are going to get to a critical level. "
Technical staffs from across the basin states have met over the last five weeks in an effort to find at least a temporary way to bridge the drought, which the agencies also hope will be temporary.
"Hopefully at the end of the discussions there will be some common agreement," Mulroy said. "We have to protect the users on the river system."
However, that could mean urban users, who take, according to Mulroy, about 15 percent of the river's water, could be at odds with agricultural users, who use 85 percent for the production of alfalfa, cotton, and vegetables in California and Arizona.
If the lake's elevation is to be protected, Mulroy and other urban water agencies expect the cuts in use to come from the agricultural users.
Agricultural users are not eagerly embracing the concept.
"Right now the initial discussions with the Department of Interior have not yielded anything we could agree to," said Ron Hull, a spokesman for the Imperial Irrigation District, the home of 600 farms that collectively consume 3.1 million acre-feet a year.
Flood prevention and irrigation needs in the Imperial Valley were the reason the Hoover Dam was built, and the farmers of the Southern California agricultural region have legal first claim to water from the river. Hull said they would not give that up without a fight.
"You would have to overturn existing river law," he said. "We'll protect the status of the law of the river allocations as they've been established over the historical pattern."
Hull noted that the Imperial Valley farmers already have had to turn over water to urban water users in Southern California in a deal signed last year, so they feel that they've already contributed their share.
He said any deal that significantly impacted the farmers of California and Arizona would hit every consumer. The $1.1 billion vegetable crop includes 75 to 80 percent of America's wintertime vegetables, he said.
Hull, who will lead a delegation of farmers from the Imperial Valley to Las Vegas today and Saturday, said short-term, negotiated reductions in water use aren't off the table -- but those talks, at least with the irrigation district, haven't begun in earnest.
Water authority managers say the talks with the other states will continue. Any solution, Mulroy said, has to conclude the Imperial Irrigation District because it is the single largest consumer of Colorado River water.
Mulroy, in the morning in Las Vegas, said she hoped to have a "protected elevation" by the end of the day, a lake level that would require cutting off or limiting some water users to protect against the lake's depletion.
She said from that the conference of the basin states failed to set that protected elevation, but the agencies would come together July 22 and 23 in Salt Lake to take up the issue once again.
Mulroy said in the meantime, the water authority "has to plan for the worst." Work to lower the intakes for Southern Nevada's water system "has to begin as soon as possible."
"It is an emergency," she said.
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