Editorial: Thirsty days on horizon

Wednesday, April 27, 2005 | 8:49 a.m.

Many of us are guilty of thinking about the scarcity of water in Southern Nevada as if it were a problem for some future generation to solve. Well, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is saying now that the region will run out of a sufficient supply of water in five years unless alternative sources are found. In the year 2010, many of us, if not most of us, will still be living here. That future generation, it turns out, is us.

By 2035, the water authority says, the situation will be critical. We will need twice as much water from the Colorado River as we are permitted by federal law to take. This only makes sense, as the U.S. Census Bureau last week came out with its population projections for Nevada. It reported that our population will have doubled by 2030. This is especially sobering because Census Bureau reports err on the side of caution. Our population may very well double years before 2030.

What to do? The water authority has foreseen a crisis since the late 1980s, when it began seeking rights to the groundwater in counties north of Clark. But building pipelines to bring that water to Southern Nevada would cost billions. Laying the pipelines would harm the environment, and there's really no accurate way to predict what impact massive groundwater diversion would have on the northern counties and on Utah, which shares a common water basin with Nevada.

The water authority says it really has no choice but to seriously consider that option. Before setting forth on such a potentially ruinous course, we believe there should be a plan for even greater conservation. Efforts over the past two years have saved more than 50,000 acre-feet of water annually. Much more could be done, however. We would also like to see serious analyses of the potential of desalinated ocean water, which is technically possible now. We could spend billions on upstate groundwater and maybe get a supply lasting only a few years. But if we provided California with a desalination plant in exchange for a percentage of its allotment from the Colorado River, future generations could likely say we solved the problem for them.