The Chosen One June 8 2008 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun Page 6 of 10 back into line that even President Bush's new interior secretary adopted the Babbitt policy. Mulroy did not stop there. Ferocious in search of water, she executed trades so complex that in 2006 even the state engineer's panel of professional water people had trouble following them. A sample: • She struck a massive water - banking deal with Arizona, paying Arizona to store unused water in its aquifer and allowing Las Vegas to withdraw the difference from Lake Mead. • She bought up historic, pre - Colorado Compact water rights on the Virgin and Muddy rivers, both Colorado River tributaries. • She moved with Arizona and California to have a reservoir built that will prevent Mexico from receiving more Colorado River water than it is allocated, and secured the right to draw some of the saved water from Lake Mead. But the biggest, most potentially valuable supply of water in the Las Vegas water plan was still the vast pool underlying the Great Basin. The Great Basin got its name because the region doesn't drain to the sea. Extending from Death Valley to Salt Lake, it amounts to a 200,000- square -mile bowl engulfed by mountainous walls — the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range to the West and the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau to the East. It contains most of Nevada, a slice of Northern California, a small topping from Oregon and roughly half of Utah. The topography is classic Western basin and range and, for all its beauty, it's a prehistoric accident scene. Nevada, from the Spanish for "snow- capped," was named for its hundreds of ranges. These were formed by the stretching of the continent until it ripped apart, tossing rock and earth into what is now a heroic network of north- south - running mountains and valleys. As glaciers melted at the close of the Ice Age, the trapped store of ground water in the often porous jumble of rock underlying the area became the Great Basin "carbonate aquifer." In stark contrast to the way a massive tide of snowmelt from the Rockies courses toward the sea in the Colorado River, spring thaw in the dry ranges of the Great Basin is glugged up by plants, animals and people. What life exists naturally aboveground, both in the hot desert to the south and in the cold desert to the north, depends on the state of the underground water table. In "dry valleys," the upward pressure of the carbonate aquifer sustains the springs feeding startling oases, even in the blazing deserts of Lincoln County. In "wet valleys," the aquifer's pressure can make the desert seem suddenly lush. Snowmelt from the ranges drains into such highly saturated basins that it dances out of springs, then streams onto the valley floors. It can even shoot from newly drilled wells. Just this kind of thing used to happen in Las Vegas before it pumped its local store of ground water so hard that a place whose name means "the meadows" became scrub. Nothing terrifies the cold desert counties north of Las Vegas more than the prospect of seeing their valleys similarly denuded. Over in the Sierra, the Los Angeles Aqueduct drained what was once Owens Lake so dry that by the 1970s, its parched alkaline playa was the source of routine dust storms behind the worst recorded particulate air pollution in U.S. history. http: / /www.lasvegassun.com/news /2008 /jun/08 /chosen -one/ 6/17/2008