Friday, May 6, 2005 | 5:29 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
May 7 - 8, 2005
ESKDALE, Utah -- Every day Jerald Anderson battles the weather, insects and the ground to farm alfalfa and barley in the high desert of the Snake Valley, a broad plain in the shadow of the 13,300-foot Mount Wheeler near the state line separating Nevada and Utah.
Now Anderson believes he faces an even bigger threat: The Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Anderson and his neighbors fear that the way of life they have carved out of the desert is in peril, threatened by the thirst for water from urban Las Vegas, 250 miles to the south.
"Water is the reason we can be here," Anderson said. "For us, it is a matter of survival."
The Snake Valley and neighboring Spring Valley are the epicenter of the ambitious plans of the Southern Nevada Water Authority to build wells and pipelines that would rival those built by William Mulholland nearly a century ago to bring rural California's water to Los Angeles.
Water authority officials, especially General Manager Pat Mulroy, say they have no easy alternative to going after ground water. Much of their effort, for which they hope to bring water to Las Vegas in 2015, targets Lincoln and White Pine counties, on Nevada's east side.
They hope that the ground water project, combined with plans to divert surface water from the Virgin and Muddy rivers, will double the amount of water available to Las Vegas.
Ranchers and farmers in eastern Nevada and western Utah say that the plans have already stopped efforts to increase the use of water in the region for agricultural purposes. The greatest fear, however, is that families will lose altogether the water that has sustained them for generations.
Mulroy and water authority officials have promised to limit the impact. The agency's new wells should have minimal effect on existing springs and wells, economic losses will be compensated, and safeguards will be built in to any approvals from state and federal agencies that would turn off the taps if the impacts become significant, they say.
Andrew Kirk, a UNLV associate professor of history specializing in the American West, says what is happening in Nevada is the latest chapter in an old, old story.
"It's a familiar Western story," Kirk said. "It is a very similar trajectory to Los Angeles, with an urban area needing to tap the water resources of rural areas.
"Cities live or die by their access to water. I don't think that anyone who looks closely at the West would see any easy answers to the water problems. That's why the conflicts are so intense."
Dependable sources of water, such as Las Vegas' access to the Colorado River or the ground water used by farmers in the Snake and Spring valleys, are rare and precious in the West, Kirk notes.
"People fight practically to the death because they know those sources are few and far between," he said.
For the water authority, looking at the rural water resources "is the logical thing to do. Will there be an impact? Of course. Can it be mitigated? I don't know."
Problem source
Southern Nevada now gets 90 percent of its drinking water from the Colorado River, through the Lake Mead reservoir. The 300,000 acre-feet of water allotted to Nevada from the Colorado will always be important, but the source has several problems.
One is that the Colorado has been threatened by years of drought. But perhaps the biggest reason for seeking new sources is that urban Las Vegas and environs continue to grow by about 6 percent, or 75,000 people, annually.
All those people mean more demand for water.
Amid significant uncertainty over how much water is underground, the water authority is moving forward with its plans by taking them to the federal Bureau of Land Management and the Nevada State Engineer, which have overlapping and independent authority over the land and water that the Las Vegas agency wants to tap.
The agency plans to take 180,000 acre-feet of water from rural areas in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties. The authority has applications to take more than 140,000 acre-feet from the Spring and Snake valleys in White Pine County. Another 40,000 acre-feet would come from Lincoln County and rural parts of Clark County.
Opponents say they need to know more about how much water the agency will take from the ground, how the water authority will protect existing supplies, and other details of the plan.
They say nothing should be approved until those questions are answered in detail -- and that the BLM environmental impact statement study, expected to be completed in two years, should be put on hold until other studies can fill in the informational holes.
Water authority officials say they are still studying some of those critical issues.
Opposition grows
In Lincoln County, the political leadership has already struck a deal to divide water resources with the water authority. But in White Pine County and in neighboring Utah the opposition is strong and appears to be growing, both among political leaders and the general public.
Anderson, one of several hundred members of a conservative Christian religious community scraping out a living from the western Utah soil, says he understands the desire for the water. The water from the region is clean and tastes remarkably sweet, without the mineral taste carried by the water of the Colorado River.
"All this area grows very good-tasting hay for cows," Anderson said. "It is a very good use for the water that is here. ... This is the most reliable water in the Snake Valley."
Four decades ago, there was little but sagebrush in much of the valley, he said. Now there are crops throughout.
"Water is the reason we can be here."
Anderson and the Eskdale group have about 1,400 acres under production, alternating barley and alfalfa crops and supporting a small dairy.
Anderson, who has degrees in physics and accounting, wasn't always a farmer. While he lived in or visited Eskdale growing up, he worked in Idaho for years with a construction company. He moved back to be closer to the land and the House of Aaron religious community.
Even before the water authority moved forward with its plans, water was a concern. The authority has offered to compensate residents of Nevada and Utah who lose income because of falling water levels. Anderson says the agency leadership doesn't understand the relationship of the residents to the land in the Snake Valley.
"We believe we're supposed to be here," Anderson said. "The idea that we can just be compensated for our losses is meaningless."
The water authority's plans have helped spur the creation of a new group, the Snake Valley-Spring Valley Citizens Alliance, which covers the area from the Spring Valley community of Ely to the small agricultural town of Garrison in Utah.
"We've got to start a water monitoring program on this side of the state line," Anderson said. The goal, he said, is to find the level of the water table to measure against any future impacts. The alliance is trying to set up monitoring throughout the region, he said.
"We're trying to get a sense of the relative risk for different people in the valley," he said. "Every well owner has to understand the situation."
Even before the water authority has drilled its first test wells, farmers such as Anderson are already feeling the impact. They say their requests to drill new wells and bring more water to the surface for irrigation are being rejected because those wells could clash with the pending water authority efforts.
"We could farm 4,000 acres here if we could get access to more water," Anderson said. "They have shut down our ability to expand."
About six miles away from Anderson is the Baker Ranch, a family operation led by Dean Baker. Baker drives a beat-up 15-year-old pickup truck that belies his position as the operator of one of the region's biggest ranches. Neighbors say Baker's ranch is the biggest.
Baker, whose family moved to the valley in 1959, has about 2,000 head of cattle on about 12,000 acres. Like his neighbors, he rotates alfalfa and barley, which provide fodder for the cattle. He also has grazing rights on another 100,000 or so acres of federal land in the Snake Valley.
All of this is threatened by the water authority, Baker said.
"The water table is really close to the surface," he said, which is good news and bad news. The good news is that it is easy to get to. The bad news is that it can fall fast when new wells come in.
"If the water table were lowered even a foot, it would probably materially affect the operation," Baker said.
Baker is the White Pine County Commission's appointed representative to the Integrated Water Planning Advisory Committee, which the water authority created to develop recommendations on the authority's plans.
Baker has since become perhaps the most vocal critic of the plan to take water from the rural areas, at one point calling the effort "immoral."
Even if the water authority could prove, through test wells, that there would be minimal impact to the Snake Valley, Baker said he would still oppose the agency's effort.
"It would just take the future of this area," a future dependent on water, "and transplant it to Las Vegas. ... The amount of water is the limiting factor to everything we do in this valley," he said.
Like a lot of his neighbors, Baker foresees a future in which the water authority's wells start impacting not only the wells that sustain agriculture but also the springs that support wildlife in the Great Basin National Park and other environmental sites in the region.
The water authority estimates the cost of its project to bring water from rural Nevada at about $2 billion, and some critics have said the price tag could be significantly more.
The potential environmental impact has helped create an unlikely alliance between ranchers and environmental activists in Nevada.
Economic issue
Anderson said he is happy to accept the support of environmentalists, but he does not consider himself one of them.
"A lot of people want to characterize this as an environmental issue but for us it is an economic issue," he said.
Rose Strickland, coordinator of Nevada's Sierra Club chapter's water campaign, said the bottom line for conservationists and ranchers is the land.
"We both care about the health of that land. Differences of opinion on management disappear when a huge threat emerges," Strickland said. "Without water, the land will not be productive for ranchers, it will not be good habitat for wildlife or fish, and if the pumping impacts are severe, it will turn eastern Nevada and the West Desert into another Owens Valley."
The perceived threat helped bring about 150 people to each of the two recent hearings held by the Bureau of Land Management in White Pine County. Because wells and pipelines will go on and over BLM land, the agency must do an environmental impact statement, a two-year process that looks at the impacts of pipeline and the wells themselves.
People speaking at the meetings became emotional. Some cried, others just vented anger at the water authority while an armed White Pine sheriff's deputy stood by.
J.C. Davis, a water authority spokesman who was at the meetings, said it is important to hear the concerns of rural residents.
"The fact that they (the White Pine County residents) are raising these issues loudly is the best way to see these issues addressed," he said. But Davis said opponents will have "iron clad guarantees" from the water authority, the BLM and the Nevada State Engineer -- a state officer who must approve any water draws in Nevada -- that any negative impacts will be mitigated or the wells will stop.
The residents of White Pine County don't trust the Las Vegas officials. A common reaction among the residents is that once the wells and pipelines are built, the water will flow.
"I can't see them not putting water in the pipeline," Baker said.
Davis said the water authority's effort right now is to study the issue in detail and answer the questions of how much water is in the ground and how much can be taken without affecting other wells and springs.
Significant impacts
A recent study from Utah suggested there would be significant impacts. Water authority officials, citing federal studies, say there are huge amounts of water locked deep in aquifers that are not connected to the aquifers feeding the wells used for agriculture.
The water authority officials say they need test wells to give them more information on how much water is available.
But the residents of White Pine County say they already know what will happen. When the water is pulled out of the ground, the water tables will fall, and the existing wells and springs eventually will dry up.
One concern among residents is that if the water authority starts pumping the resource out of the Snake Valley, the salty, alkaline and undrinkable aquifer from the Great Salt Lake will push south, poisoning wells.
Jo Anne Garrett, a resident of Baker with a long history of activism in various environmental issues, said that in her 35 years of living in Nevada, the water authority's plans represent one of the greatest threats to the region.
She sells T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "Keep Your Pipes Out of My Aquifer" at public hearings on the water issue.
"The reason you live up here, if you're lucky enough to do it, is because of the wide open spaces and the air," Garrett said. "We're right next door to a national park. Mainly you just love it if you live in it, so you can't let it go away."
archive
