If Las Vegans Keep Wasting Their Water, All Bets Are Off

Before dawn, when the neon still glows and the rest of the city sleeps, the trickle of water begins miles from the famous Strip. Slow and steady, it swells into a stream, easing down a quiet neighborhood street by the time the investigator arrives.

Dennis Gegen parks his white pickup truck, grabs his video camera and begins his case outside the stucco home. Efficient and almost unnoticed, he inspects sprinklers and the flow from the leaky lawn.

“Sometimes you can follow something like this for miles,” he says, pointing to a tiny flow.

He hangs a white-and-yellow violation notice on the front doorknob.

This, he says, is the home of a water waster.

Away from the fantasy of a desert oasis, reality is often a tough sell to locals: This is a parched desert city whose residents live on the edge of habitability.

This is a place that gets an average of 4 inches of rain a year, and triple-digit heat is the norm in summer.

The wasted water running down neighborhood gutters came from 1,050 miles away in the Rocky Mountains, where global warming is apparently altering conditions.

Less water has made its way to Lake Mead, filled by the Colorado River and the source of southern Nevada’s drinking water. Lake levels are the lowest since 1964.

Water waste is rampant amid the most explosive growth in the country, and the federal government says global warming will only worsen the city’s problems.

Higher temperatures will lead to more heat-related illnesses, air pollution will contribute to more respiratory problems and water woes will increase, a government report says.

Conserve or else, water officials say. Manage growth better or stop it, environmentalists say.

In the 1920s, when Las Vegas was nothing but a dusty railroad town, no one knew the boomtown it would become. So when water rights to the Colorado were given out in 1928, Nevada got the least.

For a while, 300,000 acre-feet of water a year seemed to be enough.

An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, enough water to supply two families for a year.

But this year, metro Las Vegas, at 1.5 million people and counting, will exceed its allotment for the first time by an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 acre-feet.

Water officials are convinced that Las Vegas has enough water to keep growing until 2050, assuming the city meets conservation goals.

So far, conservation hasn’t been taken seriously.

The city failed to meet its conservation goals for the last three years. Last year, 10.4 billion gallons of water were wasted--enough to wash 260 million cars, the local water authority says.

Lawns in sprawling subdivisions require 90 inches of water a year to stay healthy, but most residents use much more.

Residents are forbidden from watering their lawns between noon and 7 p.m., but Gegen always finds a waster.

“Every time,” he says, shaking his head.

The city’s poor conservation forced the Las Vegas Valley Water District to get tougher. Now, chronic wasters must pay a fine or attend a conservation class.

Jean Bell, a veteran of desert living after enduring Las Cruces, N.M., before her move to Las Vegas in 2000, isn’t impressed with her fellow Las Vegans.

“This town is watering streets and wasting water like I can’t believe,” she says. “It’s like going back in time 100 years. I can’t believe how backward they are.”

In Las Vegas, the heat is as constant as the neon. Summer temperatures of 110 are not uncommon. Cars turn into ovens. Leaving an air-conditioned building is like entering a sauna.

“Hotter than hell,” sums up Allean Blair, 65, as she sits inside Derfelt Senior Center.

The recent U.S. government report says that by 2100, global warming will cause temperatures in Nevada to increase 5 or 6 degrees in the summer.

Environmentalists say water waste is a sign that Las Vegas can’t manage its growth.

“With dwindling water supplies, global warming and other factors, I think Las Vegas will become the ‘Apocalypse Now’ of the American West,” says David Hogan, rivers program coordinator for the Center for Biological Diversity.

The city’s growth must stop now for the city to survive, he says.

But that would put Las Vegas in a battle against what made it what it is. Stop growth and the image of an affordable city with a healthy economy quickly would fade.

City and county officials don’t want to do that, so they’re changing the way the city grows.

Compact development is being encouraged, so developers don’t “leapfrog” over vacant land.

To help cool the city, new parking lots are required to have trees. Front lawns of new homes can’t be more than 50% grass. Residents who rip out turf and install water-efficient landscaping are rewarded with credits on their water bills.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says Clark County is in serious violation of federal clean-air standards for dust and soot pollution, mostly from construction activity and unpaved roads. The county meets ozone regulations.

Many scientists blame greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and ozone for causing global warming, because the pollutants tend to trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere.

Back at the senior center, talk centers on old Las Vegas, when you could get from one side of town to the other in minutes, when water was never an issue and cars didn’t clog the highways.

“When I grew up here, I saw the mountains every day,” remembers Linda Rolle, 45, a Las Vegas resident since she was 3. “And now, I treasure the days I can see the mountains.

“I’m very selfish. I’d like to say, ‘Stop. Don’t let anybody else in.’ ”