More about Water

Since we aired our story on water, and what our Las Vegas Valley Water District board members have been doing to save it in their own yards, we've been thinking about where our water comes from. Did you know 90% of the water the Southern Nevada Water Authority receives comes from the Colorado River? The other 10% comes from aquifers and wells. The SNWA only gets 300,000 acre feet from the river per year. Sounds like a lot huh? But look at this. Arizona gets 2.85 million acre feet. California gets 4.4 million acre feet. Colorado gets 3.9 million acre feet, Utah 1.7 million acre feet, Wyoming(!) (and all its 515,000 people) gets 1 million acre feet and New Mexico gets .85 million acre feet. Even the country of Mexico gets more than we do! 1.5 million acre feet.
The Colorado River Compact was signed back in 1922, long before the Las Vegas Valley was at 2 million people. Still ... seems like we aren't getting our fair share.
By the way, an acre foot of water is 326,000 gallons. That's roughly enough water for two families in Las Vegas for one year.

Just something to think about.

And if you didn't see our story on "Practice what they Preach" you can see it here:
http://www.kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7936239


The emails we got after the story aired, were all quite similar. If water is in such short supply, why don't the water experts get elected officials to stop approving new housing projects?

Here's what one woman emailed:

I wish you would have asked Pat Mulroy and the commissioners why they haven't pushed for a halt to growth in the valley to save water. They all have the ability to stop issuing building permits to developers.
It's all well and good to conserve water but more people means more water being used.
Stop the growth or at least slow it down and we will save water.

Here's another:
I wonder though, when we are in such a water 'conservation' mode that these Commissioners continue to embrace every developer that just 'has' to build another shopping center-housing development-parking lot- CASINOS and on and on. It isn't rocket science-that if you quit building-and halt growth to a degree, you alleviate some of the pressure.But no- that wouldn't be 'cost-effective' I suppose.